An Exploratory Analysis of a Hybrid OSS Company’s Forum in Search of Sales Leads

—Background:Onlineforumsareinstrumentsthrough which information or problems are shared and discussed, including expressions of interests and intentions. Objective: In this paper, we present ongoing work aimed at analyzing the content of forum posts of a hybrid open source company that offers both free and commercial licenses, in order to help its community manager gain improved understanding of the forum discussions and sentiments and automatically discover new opportunities such as sales leads, i.e., people who are interested in buying a license. These leads can then be forwarded to the sales team for follow-up and can result in them potentially making a sale, thus increasing company revenue. Method: For the analysis of the forums, an untapped channel for sales leads by the company, text analysis techniques are utilized to identify potential sales leads and the discussion topics and sentiments in those leads. Results: Results of our preliminary work make a positive contribution in lessening the community manager’s work in understanding the sentiment and discussion topics in the hybrid open source forum community, as well as make it easier and faster to identify potential future customers. Conclusion: We believe that the results will positively contribute to improving the sales of licenses for the hybrid open source companyPeer reviewe

Notifying and Involving Users in Experimentation : Ethical Perceptions of Software Practitioners

Background: Experiment-driven development with the help of real usage data helps to build software products and services that are of high value to their users. As more software companies use experimentation in their development practises, ethical concerns are increasingly important. Objective: There is a need for understanding the ethical issues companies must take into account when practising experimentation as a development strategy. This paper examines how software development practitioners experience the need for notifying users when involving them in experimentation. Method: We conducted a survey within four software companies, inviting employees in different functional roles to indicate their attitudes and perceptions through a number of statements. Results: Employees working in different roles have different viewpoints on ethical issues. While managers are more conscious about company-customer relationships, UX designers appear more familiar with involving users. Developers think that details of experiments can be withheld from users if the results depend on it. Conclusion: Barriers to successfully conducting experiment-driven development are different for different roles. Clear and specific guidelines are needed for ethical aspects of experimentation.Peer reviewe

Entering an ecosystem: The hybrid OSS landscape from a developer perspective

Hybrid Open Source Software projects are virtual organizations that express characteristics of both static and dynamic behavior. They are choreographed through complex organizational structures that mix centralized governance with distributed community drivenness. While many communities use standard software tools to support their development processes, each community has its own ways of working and invisible power structures that influence how contributions are submitted, how they are verified and how decisions about the long-term direction of the software product are made. Navigating this environment is especially challenging for new developers who need to prove their abilities to gain rights to make contributions. This paper provides a viewpoint on the factors that influence a new developer's perception of the hybrid OSS developer community landscape. We apply an established developmental theory to build an initial model for the developer's context and discuss the model's validation, providing its practical and theoretical implications for building and managing on-line developer communities.Peer reviewe

Patterns of User Involvement in Experiment-Driven Software Development

Background: Experiments are often used as a means to continuously validate user needs and to aid in making software development decisions. Involving users in the development of software products benefits both the users and companies. How software companies efficiently involve users in both general development and in experiments remains unclear; however, it is especially important to determine the perceptions and attitudes held by practitioners in different roles in these companies. Objective: We seek to: 1) explore how software companies involve users in software development and experimentation; 2) understand how developer, manager and UX designer roles perceive and involve users in experimentation; and 3) uncover systematic patterns in practitioners’ views on user involvement in experimentation. The study aims to reveal behaviors and perceptions that could support or undermine experiment-driven development, point out what skills could enhance experiment-driven development, and raise awareness of such issues for companies that wish to adopt experiment-driven development. Methods: We conducted a survey within four Nordic software companies, inviting practitioners in three major roles: developers, managers, and UX designers. We asked the respondents to indicate how they involve users in their job function, as well as their perspectives regarding software experiments and ethics. Results and Conclusion: We identified six patterns describing experimentation and user involvement. For instance, managers were associated with a cautious user notification policy, that is, to always let users know of an experiment they are subject to, and they also believe that users have to be convinced before taking part in experiments. We discovered that, due to lack of clear processes for involving users and the lack of a common understanding of ethics in experimentation, practitioners tend to rationalize their perceptions based on their own experiences. Our patterns were based on empirical evidence and they can be evaluated in different populations and contexts.Peer reviewe

No landslide for the human journalist : An empirical study of computer-generated election news in Finland

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Towards Data-Driven Generation of Visualizations for Automatically Generated News Articles

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Continuous Experimentation Cookbook : An introduction to systematic experimentation for software-intensive businesses

An increasing number of companies are involved in building software-intensive products and services – hence the popular slogan “every business is a software business”. Software allows companies to disrupt existing markets because of its flexibility. This creates highly dynamic and competitive environments, imposing high risks to businesses. One risk is that the product or service is of only little or no value to customers, meaning the effort to develop it is wasted. In order to reduce such risks, you can adopt an experimentdriven development approach where you validate your product ideas before spending resources on fully developing them. Experiments allow you to test assumptions about what customers really want and react if the assumptions are wrong. This book provides an introduction to continuous experimentation, which is a systematic way to continuously test your product or service value and whether your business strategy is working. With real case examples from Ericsson, Solita, Vaadin, and Bittium, the book not only gives you the concepts needed to start performing continuous experimentation, but also shows you how others have been doing it

Introducing Continuous Experimentation in Large Software-Intensive Product and Service Organizations

Corrigendum: DOI:10.1016/j.jss.2019.02.022Software development in highly dynamic environments imposes high risks to development organizations. One such risk is that the developed software may be of only little or no value to customers, wasting the invested development efforts. Continuous experimentation, as an experiment-driven development approach, may reduce such development risks by iteratively testing product and service assumptions that are critical to the success of the software. Although several experiment-driven development approaches are available, there is little guidance available on how to introduce continuous experimentation into an organization. This article presents a multiple-case study that aims at better understanding the process of introducing continuous experimentation into an organization with an already established development process. The results from the study show that companies are open to adopting such an approach and learning throughout the introduction process. Several benefits were obtained, such as reduced development efforts, deeper customer insights, and better support for development decisions. Challenges included complex stakeholder structures, difficulties in defining success criteria, and building experimentation skills. Our findings indicate that organizational factors may limit the benefits of experimentation. Moreover, introducing continuous experimentation requires fundamental changes in how companies operate, and a systematic introduction process can increase the chances of a successful start.Peer reviewe

News Automation : The rewards, risks and realities of 'machine journalism'

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