Sari Kujala

Requirements Prioritization Challenges in Practice

Requirements prioritization is recognized as an important activity in product development. In this paper, we describe the current state of requirements prioritization practices in two case companies and present the practical challenges involved. Our study showed that requirements prioritization is an ambiguous concept and current practices in the companies are informal. Requirements prioritization requires complex context-specific decision-making and must be performed iteratively in many phases during development work. Practitioners are seeking more systematic ways to prioritize requirements but they find it difficult to pay attention to all the relevant factors that have an effect on priorities and explicitly to draw different stakeholder views together. In addition, practitioners need more information about real customer preferences.

The role of user involvement in requirements quality and project success

User involvement is the key concept in the development of useful and usable systems and has positive effects on system success and user satisfaction. This paper reports the results of interviews and a survey conducted to investigate the role of user involvement in defining user requirements in development projects. The survey involved 18 software practitioners working in software related development projects in 13 companies in Finland. In addition, eight software practitioners working in three companies were interviewed. By combining qualitative and statistical analysis, we examine how users are involved in development projects and how user involvement influences projects. The analysis shows that, although it is rare in development projects, early user involvement is related to better requirements quality. The analysis also shows that involving users and customers as the source of information is related to project success.

Implementing requirements engineering processes throughout organizations: success factors and challenges

This paper aims at identifying critical factors affecting organization-wide implementation of requirements engineering (RE) processes. The paper is based on a broad literature review and three longitudinal case studies that were carried out using an action research method. The results indicate that RE process implementation is a demanding undertaking, and its success greatly depends on such human factors as motivation, commitment and enthusiasm. Therefore, it is essential that the RE process is useful for its individual users. Furthermore, the results indicate that organizations can gain benefits from RE by defining a simple RE process, by focusing on a small set of RE practices, and by supporting the systematic usage of these practices. q 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Emotions, experiences and usability in real-life mobile phone use

Positive emotional experiences with an interactive product are assumed to lead to good user experience and, ultimately, to product success. However, the path from emotional experiences to product evaluation may not be direct, as emotions fluctuate over time, and some experiences are easier to recall than others. In this study, we examined emotions and experience episodes during real-life mobile phone use over a five-month period. The goal is to understand how emotions and memories are related to overall evaluation of a product: usability, user experience and behavioral intentions. The results show that both emotions and how people remember them had strong unique roles in the overall evaluation of the product. Positive emotions were mostly related to good user experience and negative emotions to low usability. In the early stages of use, users overestimated their positive emotions and seemed to focus on user experience, the importance of usability increased over time.

Linking the business view to requirements engineering: long-term product planning by roadmapping

Companies moving into the software product business and growing in size face new challenges that cannot be tackled completely with old practices. For example, the future development steps of the off-the-shelf products cannot be negotiated with just one or a few customers any more. This means that practitioners should be able to take aspects such as their companys own strategy and available market information more effectively into account in such decision-making. However, usually the company or business unit strategy is so high level that the gap to single requirements documents is far too long. Roadmapping is one technique that companies have used for long-term product planning in order to link the business view to requirements engineering (RE), and to make more business oriented product development decisions. In addition, roadmapping has been used to share a common understanding about the future development steps of products with different stakeholders. However, the application of the technique is not always easy. This paper gives an overview of roadmapping as a technique, and describes lessons learned from one Finnish software product company that has developed and evaluated its own roadmapping processes in their organization.

Identifying hedonic factors in long-term user experience

User experience (UX) arises from the users interaction with a product and its pragmatic and hedonic (pleasure) qualities. Until recently, UX evaluation has focused mainly on examining short-term experiences. However, as the user-product relationship evolves over time, the hedonic aspects of UX eventually seem to gain more weight over the pragmatic aspects. To this end, we have developed a UX Curve method for evaluating long-term user experience, particularly the hedonic quality. In this paper, we present a study in which the UX Curve was used to retrospectively evaluate the UX of Facebook and mobile phones. The results show that compared to a questionnaire, the UX Curve method is more effective for identifying the hedonic aspects of UX. This method can be used by practitioners and researchers who want to understand evolving UX and to design better products. This straightforward method is especially suited for industrial contexts where resources are limited.

Capturing users’ perceptions of valuable experience and meaning

Abstract In this article, we argue that more ‘fit-to-user’ products can be designed by understanding the underlying influential factors of user experience. Those factors go beyond the functional needs of the user, and thus, more ‘fit-to-user’ products can be designed. This is especially important as technology becomes more and more ubiquitous and its usage is only task- and work-related. Usability-related goals of design for devices to be used in leisure and fun activities are not enough to evoke positive emotions and satisfaction. The relevant literature is reviewed to gather an understanding of the notion of the users impractical needs and aspirations, such as social, hedonistic, and emotional values and the meanings users attach to a product in a certain context. In addition, existing methods with similar aims are reviewed. This article reports a case study of the development of a tool to elicit user values and meanings. The tool is based on a projective psychological technique and it is recommended for use at the beginning of the design process to gather user data. Empirical experience of the usage of the tool is reported with implications for the design process.

Supporting Worth Mapping with Sentence Completion

Expectations for design and evaluation approaches are set by the development practices within which they are used. Worth-Centred Development (WCD) seeks to both shape and fit such practices. We report a study that combined two WCD approaches. Sentence completion gathered credible quantitative data on user values, which were used to identify relevant values and aversions of two player groups for an on-line gambling site. These values provided human value elements for a complementary WCD approach of worth mapping. Initial worth maps were extended in three workshops, which focused on outcomes and user experiences that could be better addressed in the current product and associated marketing materials. We describe how worth maps were prepared for, and presented in, workshops, and how product owners and associated business roles evaluated the combination of WCD approaches. Based on our experiences, we offer practical advice on this combinination.

Lessons Learned from Applying the Requirements Engineering Good Practice Guide for Process Improvement

The systematic definition and management of requirements is becoming increasingly important in product development. Many software organizations are interested in improving their requirements engineering processes but they do not know where to begin. Sommerville et al. have developed a framework known as the Requirements Engineering Good Practice Guide (REGPG) for incremental process improvement. We applied the REGPG in four Finnish organizations and evaluated its strengths and weaknesses. The most important strengths of the REGPG are that it raises personnel awareness of requirements engineering and it includes relevant requirements practices allowing organizations to select practical improvement actions. The main weakness of the REGPG is that it offers a very limited set of general process improvement guidelines. Therefore, organizations that want to develop their requirements engineering processes systematically need to support the use of the REGPG with other improvement frameworks.

Collecting cross-cultural user data with internationalized storyboard survey

Globalization and the search for experiential aspects of technology products and services have increased the demand for cross-cultural user feedback. Remote methods would suit agile global data collection, but only few common practices yet exist. Thus, the goal of the present study was to determine ways in which common visual stimulus material (internationalized storyboards) are perceived similarly and differently by cross-cultural respondents. An internationalized remote online storyboard survey was designed to collect cross-cultural user data of 252 respondents, from the USA, Brazil, India, Italy and Finland -- around the topic of mobile content sharing concepts. It was found that, for the majority of situations and details, storyboards supported a similar interpretation by users from different cultural backgrounds; and internationalized pictures assisted respondents in providing rich answers to a long survey because of a sound understanding of the intended situations and ease of imagining themselves in different usage situations.