Engineering motivation requirements in business information systems.

Digital Motivation refers to the use of software-based solutions to change, boost or maintain people’s attitude and behaviour towards certain tasks, policies and regulations. Gamification, persuasive technology, and entertainment computing are example strands of such paradigm. Digital Motivation exhibits unique properties which necessitate reconsidering its design methods. This stems from the intense human factor which may make it destructive, pressuring, and a reason for negative work ethics. The emerging literature on the topic includes engineering approaches for Digital Motivation. However, their main focus is on specifying its operation, e.g., the design of rewards and levels. This thesis conducts a series of empirical studies and proposes a novel modelling framework which enables capturing Digital Motivation as an integral part of the organisational and social structure of a business. This modelling framework provides a tool which utilises the generated models to perform analysis that informs the design, introduction, and management of Digital Motivation. The modelling and analysis framework is evaluated via case studies involving novice software system analysts, expert software system analysts, and managers of a business information system. The results of the evaluation illustrate that the modelling language has a good capability to elicit and analyse motivation requirements of stakeholders of a business information system

Gamification for Volunteer Cloud Computing.

Requirements engineering is a preliminary and cru- cial phase for the correctness and quality of software systems. Despite the agreement on the positive correlation between user involvement in requirements engineering and software success, current development methods employ a too narrow concept of that “user” and rely on a recruited set of users considered to be representative. Such approaches might not cater for the diversity and dynamism of the actual users and the context of software usage. This is especially true in new paradigms such as cloud and mobile computing. To overcome these limitations, we propose crowd-centric requirements engineering (CCRE) as a revised method for requirements engineering where users become primary contributors, resulting in higher-quality requirements and increased user satisfaction. CCRE relies on crowdsourcing to support a broader user involvement, and on gamification to motivate that voluntary involvement

Four Reference Models for Transparency Requirements in Information Systems

Transparency is a key emerging requirement in modern businesses and their information systems. Transparency refers to the information which flows amongst stakeholders for the purpose of informed decision-making and taking the right action. Transparency is generally associated with positive connotations such as trust and accountability. However, it has been shown that it could have adverse effects such as information overload and affecting decisions objectiveness. This calls for systematic approaches for transparency to ensure its cost-effectiveness and avoid such adverse side effects. This is especially true considering that the relatively few works in the literature on transparency requirements have focused mainly on making information available and accessible and have paid little focus on the information receivers’ side and making it meaningful for them. In this paper, we reflect on our previous research on transparency and its multi-faceted constructs and review multi-disciplinary conceptualisation and propose four reference models which are meant to form a holistic conceptual baseline for transparency require- ments in information systems. These reference models cover transparency actors, transparency meaningfulness, transparency usefulness, and information quality in transparency. We also discuss the interdependencies amongst these four reference models and their implications for requirements engineers and information system analysts. As a proof of concept, we analyse a mainstream transparency document, the United Kingdom Freedom of Information Act, in the light of our reference models and demonstrate the need to consider transparency more holistically and the need to include the information receiver’s perspective and the inter-relations amongst various properties and constituents of transparency as well. We then highlight areas of improvement informed by our analysis

Towards a Code of Ethics for Gamification at Enterprise

Gamification is an emerging technique which utilises the “fun the- ory” mainly to motivate people to change their perception and attitude towards certain subjects. Within enterprises, gamification is used to motivate employees to do their tasks more efficiently and perhaps more enjoyably and sometimes to increase their feeling of being members of the enterprise as a community. While the literature has often emphasised the positive side of gamification, mainly from economic and business perspectives, little emphasis has been paid to the ethical use of gamification within enterprises. In this paper we report an empirical re- search to explore the ethical aspects of using gamification. We follow a mixed methods approach involving participants who are gamification experts, employ- ees and managers. Our findings show that, for gamification, there is a fine line between being a positive tool to motivate employees and being a source of ten- sion and pressure which could then affect the social and mental well-being within the workplace. This paper will evaluate that dual effect and clarify that fine line

Wisdom of the Crowd within Enterprises: Practices and Challenges

The Wisdom of the Crowd advocates that decisions collectively made by a diverse crowd could be better than those made by an elite group of experts. The Wisdom of the Crowd puts preconditions on this to work correctly. This concerns the di- versity of the crowd, their independence from each other, their decentralisation, and the methods of aggregating their distributed knowledge and forming collec- tive decisions. Although the concept is inspiring, its interpretation and conduct differ significantly amongst enterprises, especially with regard to the culture and style of management. In addition, we still lack reflections on how the Wisdom of the Crowd worked in the practice of modern enterprises. To address this lack of knowledge, this paper conducts an empirical study following a mixed method approach involving 35 senior managers coming from 33 different industries in the UK. In the first phase we interview eight managers and, in the second, we con- firm and enhance the results by a survey consisting of open-ended questions and involving 27 other managers. The results shed light on the current practice of the Wisdom of the Crowd in several UK enterprises, which can inform the analysis and design of future software tools meant to aid this emerging decision-making mechanism

Configuring Crowdsourcing for Requirements Elicitation

Crowdsourcing is an emerging paradigm which utilises the power of the crowd in contributing information and solving problems. Crowdsourcing can support requirements elicitation, especially for systems used by a wide range of users and working in a dynamic context where requirements evolve regularly. For such systems, traditional elicitation methods are typically costly and limited in catering for the high diversity, scale and volatility of requirements. In this paper, we advocate the use of crowdsourcing for requirements elicitation and investigate ways to configure crowdsourcing to improve the quality of elicited requirements. To confirm and enhance our argument, we follow an empirical approach starting with two focus groups involving 14 participants, users and developers, followed by an online expert survey involving 34 participants from the Requirements Engineering community. We discuss our findings and present a set of challenges of applying crowdsourcing to aid requirements engineering with a focus on the elicitation stage

Strategies and Design Principles to Minimize Negative Side-effects of Digital Motivation on Teamwork

Digital Motivation in business refers to the use of technology in order to facilitate a change of attitude, perception and behaviour with regards to adopting policies, achieving goals and executing tasks. It is a broad term to indicate existing and emerging paradigms such as Gamification, Persuasive Technology, Serious Games and Entertainment Computing. Our previous research indicated risks when applying Digital Motivation. One of these main risks is the impact it can have on the interpersonal relationships between colleagues and their individual and collective performance. It may lead to a feeling of unfairness and trigger negative group processes (such as social loafing and unofficial clustering) and adverse wo rk ethics. In this paper, we propose a set of strategies to minimize such risks and then consolidate these strategies through an empirical study involving managers,practitioners and users.The strategies are then analysed for their goal, stage and purpose of use to add further guidance. The strategies and their classification are meant to inform developers and management on how to design,set-up and introduce Digital Motivation to a business environment, maximize its efficiency and minimize its side-effects on teamwork

Social Computing for Software Engineering: a Mapping Study.

There is a continual growth in the use of social computing within a breadth of business domains; such as marketing, public engagement and innovation management. Software engineering research, like other similar disciplines, has re- cently started to harness the power of social computing throughout the various development phases; from requirements elicitation to validation and maintenance and for the various methods of development and structures of development teams. However, despite this increasing effort, we still lack a clear picture of the current status of this research. To address that lack of knowledge, we conduct a systematic mapping study on the utilisation of social computing for software engineering. This will inform researchers and practitioners about the current status and progress of the field including the areas of current focus and the geographical and chronological distribution of the research. We do the mapping across a diversity of dimensions including the activities of software engineering, the types of research, the characteristics of social computing and the demographic attributes of the published work. Our study results show a growing interest in the field, mainly in academia, and a general trend toward developing designated social com- puting platforms and utilising them in mainly four software engineering areas; management, coding, requirements engineering, and maintenance and enhancement