Research Group for Applied Software Engineering
Forschungsgruppe für Angewandte Softwaretechnik
Master's Thesis
A context-sensitive user feedback mechanism for continuous software evolution
Advisor
Stephan Krusche
Author
Dora Dzvonyar
Date
October 2015
Regular user feedback is important, as it helps to validate requirements and improves user satisfaction. However, it fails to unfold its full potential in many projects. Common challenges include low user motivation, fragmented feedback channels, and missing information, making it difficult for the development team to extract the underlying requirements of the user. We aim to address these problems by proposing a system for Context-Aware Feedback (CAFE), which integrates user feedback into the software evolution process. The objective is to provide a channel for users to give feedback with as little effort as possible in order to bridge the gap between users and developers. CAFE stores feedback directly in the issue tracker enriching it with recorded usage context and visualizes the evolution of requirements through user feedback. In a formative evaluation with controlled user experiments we found that both developers and users prefer CAFE to other feedback channels and that automatically gathered context data is useful. Both the fact that user feedback is saved in the issue tracker and the added value of Feedback Traceability are regarded as beneficial.