Towards a Non-Functional Requirements Discovery Approach for Persuasive Systems

[Abstract] A number of software systems that attempt to help people achieve behavior change have been proposed in various domains such as health and wellness. However, sometimes, such systems have failed to provide a satisfactory or sustainable User Experience (UX), as it is observed when users may be reluctant to respond to the activation of the systems' changing demands. Moreover, a negative User Experience (UX) can be exposed by Behavior Change Support Systems (BCSS) if designers do not have clear understanding of the requirements that factually help changing the user behavior that accomplishes a sustainability goal. We first explored the Persuasive System Design (PSD) model that should be considered in UX assessment of BCSSs. Then, we propose a requirements discovery process that can be considered to redesign a software interactive system based on negative UX.This work has received partial support by the projects FEDER-UE CSI ED431G/01, ED43C 2018/29, accreditation 2016-2019 ED431G/08, KUSISQA supported by N° 014-2019-FONDECYT-BM-INC.INV, NOVA LINCS UID/CEC/04516/2019, MICINN IJC2018-037522-I, RTI2018-099646-B-I00Xunta de Galicia; ED431G/01Xunta de Galicia; ED43C 2018/29Xunta de Galicia; ED431G/08Gobierno de Chile; 014-2019-FONDECYTBM-INC.INVRepública Portuguesa. Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia; UID/CEC/04516/201

Metrics for Green and Sustainable Software.

Several initiatives have been proposed in recent years with the purpose of investigating how to tackle sustainability issues within software systems and software engineering. However, there is a lack of attention from the research community in exploring sustainability as an emergent quality property of the software systems, especially when they are becoming more and more distributed, heterogeneous, and dynamic. In order to involve a more international research community, and provide an open forum for researchers and practitioners working on green and sustainable measurement and metrics, an interactive workshop is planned within the IWSM-Mensura conference

Analyzing Emotions in Conceptual Models Verification Tasks performed in Online Contests

Emotion research in the area of software engineering has gained significant attention. Mostly this research has been focused on understanding the role of emotions in software programming carried out within collaborative software development environments. With the purpose of providing more evidence on emotion research in the early stages of the software life cycle, in this paper, we report the results of a live study conducted in competitive conditions. The main objective of the study is to analyze the emotions expressed by competitors when performing verification tasks with the support of CoSTest, a model-driven testing tool. Our results show that participants tend to experience more positive emotions (e.g., attentive, alert, active) than negative emotions (upset, hostile, afraid) when verification tasks are performed in an online contest

AB=ᗺA: execution equivalence as a new type of testing oracle

This paper introduces a new type of automated testing oracle, called the execution equivalence (EE) invariants. These invariants can be mined from application logs that capture both application events and application states. The EE-invariants express an equivalence relation on the sequences of application events in terms of equality of respective initial and final states, which these sequences leave in the logs during the run-time. We claim that even equivalences up to a length of four events already provide useful testing oracle. We extended our tool LOPI (LOg-based Pattern Inferencer) with the algorithm for mining EE-invariants, and evaluated the effectiveness of these invariants on a case-study --- the web application Flex Store. The evaluation is carried out based on two parameters: the false positive rate and the fault finding capability. Moreover, we compared the strength of LOPI's execution equivalences with Daikon's data invariants. This comparison has shown that Daikon was slightly more effective than LOPI in testing Flex Store. However, we have found a suitable confidence level for LOPI which allows to outperform Daikon

How Can Personality Influence Perception on Security of Context-Aware Applications?

Our lives are being transformed by context-aware software applications with important social, environmental, and economic implications. [Question/Problem] Experts recognized that quality attributes, e.g. security, are the cornerstone to get healthy social implications of these applications. However, do end-users (service consumers) perceive these attributes as so important? [Methodology] To answer this question, we designed a survey, to understand how end-users perceive security of context-aware software applications and how the users’ personality traits might influence their perceptions. To this end, we did a web-based survey that embeds two animated-demonstration videos in order to present i) the functionality of a context-aware mobile app, and ii) some vulnerabilities of the mobile app. It involved 48 subjects divided in two groups: subjects with software engineering (SE) background (Group A) and subjects without any SE background (Group B). [Results] Our study found that the importance of confidentiality and integrity is more clearly perceived by subjects with SE backgrounds (Group A). Accountability is more difficult to be perceived by subjects. And this difficulty can be even more pronounced for subjects without any SE background (Group B). Our findings suggest that importance preferences on security are influenced by personality types. For instance, open-minded people have a higher propensity to perceive the importance of confidentiality and integrity. Whilst, people with a high level of agreeableness hold quite different perceptions regarding the importance of authenticity and accountability. Analyzing the level of association between personality and the perceived importance on security, we found that the importance perceptions on confidentiality are influenced by the personality of subjects from Group B. And, the changes (positive an negative) in the importance perception on confidentiality are very strongly influenced by personality, even more so by the personality of subjects from Group B