Feedback Gathering from an Industrial Point of View

Feedback communication channels allow end-users to express their needs, which can be considered in software development and evolution. Although feedback gathering and analysis have been identified as an important topic and several researchers have started their investigation, information is scarce on how software companies currently elicit end-user feedback. In this study, we explore the experiences of software companies with respect to feedback gathering. The results of a case study and online survey indicate two sides of the same coin: on the one hand, most software companies are aware of the relevance of end-user feedback for software evolution and provide feedback channels, which allow end-users to communicate their needs and problems. On the other hand, the quantity and quality of the feedback received varies. We conclude that software companies still do not fully exploit the potential of end-user feedback for software development and evolution

GARUSO: a gamification approach for involving stakeholders outside organizational reach in requirements engineering

Stakeholder participation is a key success factor of Requirements Engineering (RE). Typically, the techniques used for identifying and involving stakeholders in RE assume that stakeholders can be identified among the members of the organizations involved when a software system is ordered, developed or maintained—and that these stakeholders can be told or even mandated to contribute. However, these assumptions no longer hold for many of today’s software systems where significant stakeholders (in particular, end-users and people affected by a system) are outside organizational reach: They are neither known nor can they easily be identified in the involved organizations nor can they be told to participate in RE activities. We have developed the GARUSO approach to address this problem. It uses a strategy for identifying stakeholders outside organizational reach and a social media platform that applies gamification for motivating these stakeholders to participate in RE activities. In this article, we describe the GARUSO approach and report on its empirical evaluation. We found that the identification strategy attracted a crowd of stakeholders outside organizational reach to the GARUSO platform and motivated them to participate voluntarily in collaborative RE activities. From our findings, we derived a first set of design principles on how to involve stakeholders outside organizational reach in RE. Our work expands the body of knowledge on crowd RE regarding stakeholders outside organizational reach

Agile challenges in practice: a thematic analysis

As agile is maturing and becoming more widely adopted, it is important that researchers are aware of the real-world challenges faced by practitioners and organisations. We undertook a thematic analysis of 193 agile challenges collected at a series of agile conferences and events during 2013 and 2014. Participants were mainly practitioners and business representatives along with some academics. The challenges were thematically analysed by separate authors, synthesised, and a list of seven themes and twenty-seven sub-themes was agreed. Themes were Organisation, Sustainability, Culture, Teams, Scale, Value and Misconceptions and shortcomings. We compare our findings against previous attempts to identify and categorise agile challenges. While most themes have persisted we found a shift of focus towards issues related to sustainability, business engagement and transformation, as well as misconceptions and shortcomings. We identify areas for further research and a need for more innovative methods of conveying academic research to industry and industrial problems to academi

Eyewear Computing \u2013 Augmenting the Human with Head-Mounted Wearable Assistants

The seminar was composed of workshops and tutorials on head-mounted eye tracking, egocentric vision, optics, and head-mounted displays. The seminar welcomed 30 academic and industry researchers from Europe, the US, and Asia with a diverse background, including wearable and ubiquitous computing, computer vision, developmental psychology, optics, and human-computer interaction. In contrast to several previous Dagstuhl seminars, we used an ignite talk format to reduce the time of talks to one half-day and to leave the rest of the week for hands-on sessions, group work, general discussions, and socialising. The key results of this seminar are 1) the identification of key research challenges and summaries of breakout groups on multimodal eyewear computing, egocentric vision, security and privacy issues, skill augmentation and task guidance, eyewear computing for gaming, as well as prototyping of VR applications, 2) a list of datasets and research tools for eyewear computing, 3) three small-scale datasets recorded during the seminar, 4) an article in ACM Interactions entitled \u201cEyewear Computers for Human-Computer Interaction\u201d, as well as 5) two follow-up workshops on \u201cEgocentric Perception, Interaction, and Computing\u201d at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) as well as \u201cEyewear Computing\u201d at the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp)

Form Follows Function: Designing For Tensions Of Conversational Agents In Service Encounters

The proliferation of conversational agents (CAs) promises efficiency and quality improvements while enabling a more seamless integration of technology into service encounters. However, it remains unclear how CAs should be designed to provide the optimal experience for the key users: clients and frontline employees. Based on qualitative research with those key users, this study delivers a vision of an adaptable CA. It proposes a differentiated approach toward the design of CA: there is no one-size-fits-all design regarding the level of social presence, autonomy, or agency. The analysis reveals three tensions in user expectations leading to inconsistent design requirements for CAs. To resolve those tensions, CAs should be adapted to the changing context of a service encounter considering the appropriate level of autonomy, task complexity, interpersonal intimacy, and social role of the CA. The study contributes three design principles emphasizing the importance of the context for which a CA is designed

From Process to Practice: Towards a Practice-Based Model of Digital Innovation

The ongoing digitalization of many corporate functions, including the innovation process, brings about fundamental changes that urge us to rethink established theories. Facilitating digital innovation requires a deep understanding of the actual practices that are carried out by innovating people with the help of artifacts. In this paper, we study the use of artifacts and illustrate their different roles in the underlying innovation practices to provide rich insights into digital innovation from a practice perspective. Grounded in a nearly three year-long, qualitative case study at two Swiss software companies and an extensive set of empirical data, this paper conceptualizes four interrelated digital innovation practices, namely making sense of an idea, aligning mental models, negotiating solution paths, and crafting an idea. We suggest a practice-based model of digital innovation, specify a set of practices for enabling digital innovation in organizations, and clarify the role of artifacts in digital innovation practices

GSGS'18 ::3rd Gamification & Serious Game Symposium : health and silver technologies, architecture and urbanism, economy and ecology, education and training, social and politics

The GSGS’18 conference is at the interface between industrial needs and original answers by highlighting the playful perspective to tackle technical, training, ecological, management and communication challenges. Bringing together the strengths of our country, this event provides a solid bridge between academia and industry through the intervention of more than 40 national and international actors. In parallel with the 53 presentations and demos, the public will be invited to participate actively through places of exchange and round tables

Fabricate 2020

Fabricate 2020 is the fourth title in the FABRICATE series on the theme of digital fabrication and published in conjunction with a triennial conference (London, April 2020). The book features cutting-edge built projects and work-in-progress from both academia and practice. It brings together pioneers in design and making from across the fields of architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation. Fabricate 2020 includes 32 illustrated articles punctuated by four conversations between world-leading experts from design to engineering, discussing themes such as drawing-to-production, behavioural composites, robotic assembly, and digital craft

Save Money or Feel Cozy?: A Field Experiment Evaluation of a Smart Thermostat that Learns Heating Preferences

We present the design of a fully autonomous smart thermostat that supports end-users in managing their heating preferences in a realtime pricing regime. The thermostat uses a machine learning algorithm to learn how a user wants to trade off comfort versus cost. We evaluate the thermostat in a field experiment in the UK involving 30 users over a period of 30 days. We make two main contributions. First, we study whether our smart thermostat enables end-users to handle real-time prices, and in particular, whether machine learning can help them. We find that the users trust the system and that they can successfully express their preferences; overall, the smart thermostat enables the users to manage their heating given real-time prices. Moreover, our machine learning-based thermostats outperform a baseline without machine learning in terms of usability. Second, we present a quantitative analysis of the users’ economic behavior, including their reaction to price changes, their price sensitivity, and their comfort-cost trade-offs. We find a wide variety regarding the users’ willingness to make trade-offs. But in aggregate, the users’ settings enabled a large amount of demand response, reducing the average energy consumption during peak hours by 38%

Built-in resilience through disaster risk reduction: operational issues

It has been argued that the broad range of people responsible for the delivery, operation and maintenance of the built environment need to become more proactively involved in making the built environment resilient to a wide range of known and unforeseen hazards and threats. Accordingly, the (actual and potential) roles of a wide range of stakeholders associated with the integration of Disaster Risk Reduction into the (re-)development of the built environment are examined. A review of literature, government data and interviews with key stakeholders in England, highlights that despite regulatory intentions to increase local resilience through the use of public and private sector stakeholders, a number of structural and operational obstacles exist. A range of strategies can be employed to overcome these obstacles: revisions to building codes, tightening planning policy, improving professional training, clarifying roles and missions, enabling complementary bottom-up and top-down approaches, and the provision of good practice guidance about the broad range of structural and non-structural risk reduction measures. Many of the operational challenges are non-structural and require a coherent, overarching strategy: changing and aligning the social understandings and practices in civil society, government and building environment stakeholders