A survey on user involvement in software Development Life Cycle from practitioner's perspectives

Abstract

User involvement is an important issue that is currently discuss in software development industry. This is due to the incidence of user frustration when using a software product. The literature on software development reflected that the involvement of users in all stages of user involvement in software development lifecycle (SDLC) process can contributes to the software usability. Although practitioners have agreed that user involvement in software development is very important but the extent of user involvement in practice is still unknown. This paper reports on a study that was conducted to investigate user involvement in the SDLC process. The objective of the study is to investigate the degree of user involvement in SDLC process. In the study the Human Centered System Development Life Cycle (HCSDLC) model was used as the research model. In the study a survey was carried out and 32 software practitioners has responded to the survey. The result of this survey indicated that user involvement is mainly concentrated in the functional requirement gathering rather than non-functional requirement gathering. This paper then concludes that practitioners do not involve users in the non-functional requirements gathering which then implies that users are not involved in determining the kind of software used during the SDLC process.