Leveraging Diversity in Software Engineering Education through Community Engaged Learning and a Supportive Network

While a lack of diversity is a longstanding problem in computer science and engineering, universities and organizations continue to look for solutions to this issue. Among the first of its kind, we launched INSPIRE: STEM for Social Impact, a program at the University of Victoria, Canada, aimed to motivate and empower students from underrepresented groups in computer science and engineering to develop digital solutions for society impactful projects by engaging in experiential learning projects with identified community-partners. The twenty-four students in the program came from diverse backgrounds in terms of academic areas of study, genders, ethnicities, and levels of technical and educational experience. Working with six community partners, these students spent four months learning and developing solutions for a societal and/or environmental problem with potential for local and global impacts. Our experiences indicate that working in a diverse team with real clients on solving pressing issues produces a sense of competence, relatedness, and autonomy which are the basis of self-determination theory. Due to the unique structure of this program, the three principles of self-determination theory emerged through different experiences, ultimately motivating the students to build a network of like-minded people. The importance of such a network is profound in empowering students to succeed and, in retrospect, remain in software engineering fields. We address the diversity problem by providing diverse, underrepresented students with a safe and like-minded environment where they can learn and realize their full potential. Hence, in this paper, we describe the program design, experiences, and lessons learned from this approach. We also provide recommendations for universities and organizations that may want to adapt our approach

Inclusiveness Matters: A Large-Scale Analysis of User Feedback

In an era of rapidly expanding software usage, catering to the diverse needs of users from various backgrounds has become a critical challenge. Inclusiveness, representing a core human value, is frequently overlooked during software development, leading to user dissatisfaction. Users often engage in discourse on online platforms where they indicate their concerns. In this study, we leverage user feedback from three popular online sources, Reddit, Google Play Store, and Twitter, for 50 of the most popular apps in the world to reveal the inclusiveness-related concerns from end users. Using a Socio-Technical Grounded Theory approach, we analyzed 23,107 posts across the three sources and identified 1,211 inclusiveness related posts. We organize our empirical results in a taxonomy for inclusiveness comprising 6 major categories: Fairness, Technology, Privacy, Demography, Usability, and Other Human Values. To explore automated support to identifying inclusiveness-related posts, we experimented with five state-of-the-art pre-trained large language models (LLMs) and found that these models' effectiveness is high and yet varied depending on the data source. GPT-2 performed best on Reddit, BERT on the Google Play Store, and BART on Twitter. Our study provides an in-depth view of inclusiveness-related user feedback from most popular apps and online sources. We provide implications and recommendations that can be used to bridge the gap between user expectations and software so that software developers can resonate with the varied and evolving needs of the wide spectrum of users

Unveiling the Life Cycle of User Feedback: Best Practices from Software Practitioners

User feedback has grown in importance for organizations to improve software products. Prior studies focused primarily on feedback collection and reported a high-level overview of the processes, often overlooking how practitioners reason about, and act upon this feedback through a structured set of activities. In this work, we conducted an exploratory interview study with 40 practitioners from 32 organizations of various sizes and in several domains such as e-commerce, analytics, and gaming. Our findings indicate that organizations leverage many different user feedback sources. Social media emerged as a key category of feedback that is increasingly critical for many organizations. We found that organizations actively engage in a number of non-trivial activities to curate and act on user feedback, depending on its source. We synthesize these activities into a life cycle of managing user feedback. We also report on the best practices for managing user feedback that we distilled from responses of practitioners who felt that their organization effectively understood and addressed their users' feedback. We present actionable empirical results that organizations can leverage to increase their understanding of user perception and behavior for better products thus reducing user attrition.Comment: 2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineerin

Beyond Traditional Feedback Channels: Extracting Requirements-Relevant Feedback from TikTok and YouTube

The increasing importance of videos as a medium for engagement, communication, and content creation makes them critical for organizations to consider for user feedback. However, sifting through vast amounts of video content on social media platforms to extract requirements-relevant feedback is challenging. This study delves into the potential of TikTok and YouTube, two widely used social media platforms that focus on video content, in identifying relevant user feedback that may be further refined into requirements using subsequent requirement generation steps. We evaluated the prospect of videos as a source of user feedback by analyzing audio and visual text, and metadata (i.e., description/title) from 6276 videos of 20 popular products across various industries. We employed state-of-the-art deep learning transformer-based models, and classified 3097 videos consisting of requirements relevant information. We then clustered relevant videos and found multiple requirements relevant feedback themes for each of the 20 products. This feedback can later be refined into requirements artifacts. We found that product ratings (feature, design, performance), bug reports, and usage tutorial are persistent themes from the videos. Video-based social media such as TikTok and YouTube can provide valuable user insights, making them a powerful and novel resource for companies to improve customer-centric development

Inclusiveness Matters: A Large-Scale Analysis of User Feedback

<p>This dataset includes the user feedback (app reviews, Reddit, and Twitter posts) from 50 popular apps, used in our study on analyzing inclusivenss in user feedback. We also provide the labels for the manually labelled data. In addition, we also provide the memoing for the analysis of the social technical grounded theory process. </p><p> </p&gt