Human Aspects Of Software Engineering Research Articles

Human Aspects in Software Engineering: Challenges, best practices and future direction

Human Aspects in Software Engineering: Challenges, best practices and future direction

Secondary studies on human aspects in software engineering: A tertiary study

Context:This study compiles the evidence reported on the human aspects of software engineering in view of providing a comprehensive catalogue of human aspects that have been examined. Objective:To summarise the existing systematic literature on human aspects in software engineering. Method:This study employs published tertiary research guidelines to investigate secondary studies published between 1940 and 2021. Results:We identified 67 secondary studies concentrating on 16 different human aspects research categories, including Agile, Economic Factors, Environmental Factors to Productivity, Success, and Teams. Several trends reveal the topics that have received the least (e.g., “software engineer controllers”) and most (e.g., “individual human aspects”) attention in research. Outcomes show that the number of secondary studies on human aspects in software engineering continues to rise when compared to other software engineering topics, despite experiencing a significant drop in 2020. Many secondary studies implemented established guidelines, especially those published in scholarly journals. While there is variance in the quality of published secondary studies, the average quality score across the investigated studies was 3.09 out of 4.0, with journal-published studies and one thesis having higher quality than conference and workshops papers. Specific institutions are also more central to the publication of secondary studies. Furthermore, there has been noteworthy advancement in the consideration of human aspects across the domain. Finally, we discovered several relationships among human aspects investigated. For example, the “Industry” subject of investigation is strongly correlated with the “Theoretical” study type. Conclusion:The overview provided by this study allows researchers and practitioners to gain familiarity with the current state of research on human aspects, helping researchers to identify gaps for further study and allowing practitioners to discover high-quality, evidence-based approaches to harness the power of human aspects in software engineering.

Psychometrics in Behavioral Software Engineering: A Methodological Introduction with Guidelines

A meaningful and deep understanding of the human aspects of software engineering (SE) requires psychological constructs to be considered. Psychology theory can facilitate the systematic and sound development as well as the adoption of instruments (e.g., psychological tests, questionnaires) to assess these constructs. In particular, to ensure high quality, the psychometric properties of instruments need evaluation. In this article, we provide an introduction to psychometric theory for the evaluation of measurement instruments for SE researchers. We present guidelines that enable using existing instruments and developing new ones adequately. We conducted a comprehensive review of the psychology literature framed by the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. We detail activities used when operationalizing new psychological constructs, such as item pooling, item review, pilot testing, item analysis, factor analysis, statistical property of items, reliability, validity, and fairness in testing and test bias. We provide an openly available example of a psychometric evaluation based on our guideline. We hope to encourage a culture change in SE research towards the adoption of established methods from psychology. To improve the quality of behavioral research in SE, studies focusing on introducing, validating, and then using psychometric instruments need to be more common.

Behavioral Science and Diversity in Software Engineering

The “Practioners' Digest” department in this issue of IEEE Software covers two topics: the behavioral science of software engineering and diversity in software engineering (this issue’s theme) and includes papers from the 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE20), 2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME19), 13th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE20), Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement 2020 (ESEM20), and Association for Computing Machinery Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE20). Feedback or suggestions are welcome. In addition, if you try or adopt any of the practices included in this article, please send me and the authors of the paper(s) a note about your experiences.

The Role of Ethnographic Studies in Empirical Software Engineering

Ethnography is a qualitative research method used to study people and cultures. It is largely adopted in disciplines outside software engineering, including different areas of computer science. Ethnography can provide an in-depth understanding of the socio-technological realities surrounding everyday software development practice, i.e., it can help to uncover not only what practitioners do, but also why they do it. Despite its potential, ethnography has not been widely adopted by empirical software engineering researchers, and receives little attention in the related literature. The main goal of this paper is to explain how empirical software engineering researchers would benefit from adopting ethnography. This is achieved by explicating four roles that ethnography can play in furthering the goals of empirical software engineering: to strengthen investigations into the social and human aspects of software engineering; to inform the design of software engineering tools; to improve method and process development; and to inform research programmes. This article introduces ethnography, explains its origin, context, strengths and weaknesses, and presents a set of dimensions that position ethnography as a useful and usable approach to empirical software engineering research. Throughout the paper, relevant examples of ethnographic studies of software practice are used to illustrate the points being made.

Extracting and analyzing time-series HCI data from screen-captured task videos

Recent years have witnessed the increasing emphasis on human aspects in software engineering research and practices. Our survey of existing studies on human aspects in software engineering shows th...

Behavioral software engineering: A definition and systematic literature review

Throughout the history of software engineering, the human aspects have repeatedly been recognized as important. Even though research that investigates them has been growing in the past decade, these aspects should be more generally considered.The main objective of this study is to clarify the research area concerned with human aspects of software engineering and to create a common platform for future research. In order to meet the objective, we propose a definition of the research area behavioral software engineering (BSE) and present results from a systematic literature review based on the definition.The result indicates that there are knowledge gaps in the research area of behavioral software engineering and that earlier research has been focused on a few concepts, which have been applied to a limited number of software engineering areas. The individual studies have typically had a narrow perspective focusing on few concepts from a single unit of analysis. Further, the research has rarely been conducted in collaboration by researchers from both software engineering and social science.Altogether, this review can help put a broader set of human aspects higher on the agenda for future software engineering research and practice.

Modules and transactions: Building blocks for a theory of software engineering

This article leverages the findings of the transaction cost economics field, and proposes a simple theory and associated vocabulary to serve as a foundation for a unified theory of software engineering. The theory characterizes software engineering as a set of transactions organized under a spectrum of three governance structures (top–down, bottom–up and reuse), and explains the strengths and weaknesses of these governance structures in relation to asset specificity and uncertainty. It takes into account the recursive nature of the notions in software engineering, and applies uniformly to various contexts at different levels of granularity. It sheds light both on the technical and on the human aspects of software engineering through a unified explanatory framework, without requiring a need to assemble different approaches to address each. The theory not only explains some of the propositions given in the software engineering literature but also reveals the boundaries of their applicability.

Personality Profiles of Software Engineers and Their Software Quality Preferences

Studies related to human aspects in software engineering (SE) have been performed from different perspectives. These perspectives include the study of human factors in different phases of software life cycle, effect of team performance in software development, how can a personality trait suit a particular task, and about some other miscellaneous issues. This research work aims to establish personality profiles of Pakistani software engineers using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) instrument. This survey has collected personality profiles of 110 software engineers. Moreover, their preferences of software quality attributes have also been collected. Analysis of the study shows that the most prominent personality type is a combination of introversion, sensing, thinking and judging. Investigative results indicate that most of the software engineers consider usability and functionality as the most important software quality attributes.

A RULE-BASED APPROACH FOR DISCOVERING EFFECTIVESOFTWARE TEAM COMPOSITION

Human aspects in software engineering play a key role in composing effective team members. However, to date there is no general consensus on the effective personality types and diversity based on software team roles. Thus, this paper aims to discover the effective personality types and diversity based on two software team roles – team leader and programmer by using a rule-based approach. The rule-based approach by employing the rough set technique was used to discover patterns of the data selected. In this study, four main steps were involved to discover the patterns – reduct generation rules, rules generation, rules fi ltering, and rules evaluation. The results show that the rules generated achieved acceptable prediction accuracy with more than 70 per cent accuracy. In addition, the ROC value achieved 0.65, which indicates the rule-based model is valid and useful. The results reveal that the extrovert personality type is dominant for both software team roles and a homogeneous or heterogeneous team plays an equal role to determine an effective team. This study provides useful rules for decision makers to understand and get insight into selecting effective team members that lead to producing high quality software.

Understanding the Influence of User Participation and Involvement on System Success – a Systematic Mapping Study

User participation and involvement in software development are considered to be essential for a successful software system. Three research areas, human aspects of software engineering, requirements engineering, and information systems, study these topics from various perspectives. We think it is important to analyze user participation and involvement in software engineering comprehensively to encourage further research in this area. We investigate the evidence on effects of user participation and involvement on system success and we explore which methods are available in literature. A systematic mapping study was conducted. The systematic search yielded 3,698 hits, from which we identified 289 unique papers. These papers were reviewed by the first author based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. The second author validated the selection of papers by reviewing the reasons for exclusion and inclusion and the corresponding papers on a sample base. 58 of the 289 papers were selected (22 statistical survey and meta-study papers and 36 methods papers). Based on the empirical evidence of the surveys and meta-studies, we developed a meta-analysis of structural equation models. This overview demonstrates that most papers showed positive correlations between aspects of development processes (including user participation) and human aspects (including user involvement) and system success. The analysis of the proposed solutions from the method papers revealed a wide variety of user participation and involvement practices for most activities within software development.

Cooperative and human aspects of software engineering

Software is created by people for people working in a range of environments and under various conditions. Understanding the cooperative and human aspects of software development is crucial in order to comprehend how methods and tools are used, and thereby improve the creation and maintenance of software. Both researchers and practitioners have recognized the need to investigate these aspects, but the results of such investigations are dispersed in different conferences and communities. The 6th workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering held at the International Conference on Software Engineering continued the tradition from earlier workshops and provide a lively forum to discuss current developments and high quality research in the field, providing both a meeting place for the community and the possibility for researchers interested in joining the field to present and discuss their work in progress and to get an overview of the field. Further dissemination of research results will lead to improvement of software development and deployment across the globe.

Cooperative and human aspects of software engineering

Software is created by people -- software engineers in cooperation with domain experts, users and other stakeholders--in varied environments, under various conditions. Thus understanding cooperative and human aspects of software development is crucial to comprehend how and which methods and tools are required, to improve the creation and maintenance of software. The 3rd workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering held at the International Conference on Software Engineering continued the tradition from earlier workshops and provided a lively forum to discuss current developments and high quality research in the field. Further dissemination of research results will lead to an improvement of software development and deployment across the globe.

Putting Human Aspects of Software Engineering in University Curricula

Although people-related issues are central factors in determining the success of software projects, they do not receive sufficient attention in the software industry to improve project results. This essay describes two barriers to their getting more attention: barriers that originate in the academic status and positioning of software engineering. The essay also proposes several suggestions regarding the professional development of software practitioners.

Guest Editors' Introduction: Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering

Software is developed by people, used by people, and supports interaction among people. As such, human characteristics and cooperation are central to modern practical software construction. While human aspects were recognized as important over 30 years ago, recent changes in the software domain have made cooperative and human aspects of software engineering even more significant. This special issue of IEEE Software presents a sample of current research in this field illustrating the wide variety of approaches, software domains and activities in which human and cooperative aspects are being investigated.

Reflection and abstraction in learning software engineering's human aspects

Intertwining reflective and abstract modes of thinking into the education of software engineers, especially in a course that focuses on software engineering's human aspects, can increase students' awareness of the discipline's richness and complexity while enhancing their professional performance in the field. The complexity of software development environments includes the profession's cognitive and social aspects. A course designed to increase students' awareness of these complexities introduces them to reflective mental processes and to tasks that invite them to apply abstract thinking. For the past three years, we have taught a Human Aspects of Software Engineering course at both the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. This course aims to increase software engineering students' awareness of the richness and complexity of various human aspects of software engineering and of the problems, dilemmas, question, and conflicts these professionals could encounter during the software development process.

Cognitive and social aspects of software engineering

This article focuses on teaching and learning human aspects of Software Engineering (SE). Based on several classes that the author taught on the subject, the article describes a framework for a course that deals with cognitive and social aspects of SE. In these classes students worked in teams, and the lessons consisted of lectures, activities, class discussions, and student presentations. The activities which students worked on aimed to address two of the human aspects of SE: the cognitive aspect and the social aspect. Each of these aspects was discussed on the individual level and on the team level. The paper describes selected activities taken from these classes.

Teaching the human aspect of software engineering - a case study

This paper describes a course I taught at the Technion --- The Israel Institute of Technology --- which addressed human aspects of Software Engineering. More specifically, three human aspects involved in developing software systems were the focus of the course: problem solving methodologies in general and their application in developing software systems in particular; mental processes; and social processes of software-system developers.