Ulrike Abelein

Does Involving Users in Software Development Really Influence System Success

Researchers have studied how best to involve users in software development for a long time, primarily in the area of information systems and human-computer interaction. The authors consider the effects of both user participation and user involvement, which they abbreviate to UPI. Existing research describes several benefits of UPI, such as improved quality due to more precise requirements, the prevention of unneeded and expensive features, and an increase in user satisfaction, which leads to higher system use. But even though some researchers consider it to be essential to system success, other studies have found contradicting results. Furthermore, its not a common practice in todays IT projects to involve users to a large extent. To clarify UPIs effects on system success and to get a deeper understanding of the differences between user participation and user involvement, the authors reviewed the existing UPI literature in software development and conducted a systematic mapping study.

A proposal for enhancing user-developer communication in large IT projects

A review of the literature showed that the probability of system success, i.e. user acceptance, system quality and system usage, can be increased by user-developer communication. So far most research on user participation focuses either on early or on late development phases. Especially large IT projects require increased participation, due to their high complexity. We believe that the step in software development when user requirements are translated (and thus interpreted) by developers into a technical specification (i.e. system requirements, architecture and models) is a critical one for user participation. In this step a lot of implicit decisions are taken, some of which should be communicated to the end users. Therefore, we want to create a method that enhances communication between users and developers during that step. We identified trigger points (i.e. changes on initial user requirements), and the granularity level on which to communicate with the end users. Also, representations of changes and adequate means of communication are discussed.

State of Practice of User-Developer Communication in Large-Scale IT Projects

[Context and motivation] User participation in software development is considered to be essential for successful software systems. Especially missing direct communication between users and developers can cause various issues in large-scale IT projects.[Question/Problem] We want to understand current practices of user–developer communication in large-scale IT projects, the factors for, and consequences of communication gaps, and what experts suggest to prevent them. [Principal ideas/results]: We conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with twelve experts. The experts work on the coordination of Business and IT and describe their experiences gained in 69 large-scale IT projects. The analysis of our interviews showed that direct user–developer communication is limited and that no commonly used method for the user–developer communication in the design and implementation activity exists. [Contribution]: The interviews helped us to understand current practices and issues resulting from missing communication. Furthermore, we can confirm the need for a method enhancing user–developer-communication in large--scale IT projects.

A descriptive classification for end user-relevant decisions of large-scale IT projects

Large-scale IT projects with traditional development methods are still very common in practice. These projects mostly involve the end user in the beginning and at the end of the development. However, there are also user-relevant decisions in the phases between. Thus, it is important to investigate what decisions are made and which of them are user-relevant. Thus we suggested in our previous work a preliminary classification based on the TORE method to structure decisions. In this paper, we validate this classification and collected exemplary user-relevant decisions by experts in large-scale IT projects. As part of our research in user-developer communication, we conducted an interview series with twelve experts. The interviews confirmed that our previously suggested classification is comprehensive and helpful to structure decisions and revealed several amendments. The examples given by the experts enabled us to collect a comprehensive list of end user-relevant decisions, and thus lead to our descriptive classification.

Towards a holistic framework for describing and evaluating business benefits of a service oriented architecture

Though SOA has received a major attention over the past years, many companies still struggle to evaluate the benefits of adopting this technology. Indeed its impact should be considered from multiple perspectives and cannot be measured easily. As existing attempts to classify the value of SOA are still incomplete, we develop a holistic framework for evaluating the business benefits of SOA. This paper presents this framework, details its characteristics and explains the design methodology.

Evaluation of the simulated application of the UCD-LSI method: the iPeople case study

In previous work we showed in a systematic mapping study that there is no method to enhance user-developer communication (UDC) in the design and implementation phase of large-scale IT projects (LSI). We then defined the UDC-LSI method. It is substantial especially for newly designed methods to evaluate them within a real-world context. As it is difficult to find a company willing to apply an untested method, as a first step to full evaluation we present in this work a case study where we study the utility and acceptance of a simulated application of the UDC-LSI method. To make the simulation as real as possible we first thoroughly analyzed the as-is status of the iPeople project. Then we simulated an instantiation of the UDC-LSI method for the iPeople project and we evaluated this instantiation with project participants. The case study showed that it is possible to instantiate the method for the project under study. The evaluation confirmed a positive effect of the UDC-LSI method on system success (effectiveness), the feasibility and high acceptance of the method and a positive effort-benefit ratio (efficiency).