User Involvement in Continuous Experimentation

Abstract

Software product and service companies need capabilities to evaluate their development decisions and customer and user value. 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. Experimentdriven development is gaining increasing attention by the practitioners, yet it is a novel research area to be investigated. Involving users and customers in the software development process and understanding their needs and behaviors are essential aspects when building successful software products and services. Continuous experimentation approach in software development comprises user involvement by its nature, however, due to novelty of the concept, there is no clear understanding of the user involvement practices. My doctoral project aims to investigate how software development organizations can involve the users in continuous experimentation. The contributions of the research are to a) find out how involve users in software companies that begin to adopt continuous experimentation approach, b) identify the barriers hindering involving the users in the approach, and c) investigate what kinds of strategies have been used for experimentation with different software product and services.