Abstract

Software is designed and built to help solve human problems. However, much current software fails to take into account the diverse end users of software systems and their differing characteristics and needs eg. age, gender, culture, language, educational level, socio-economic status, physical and mental challenges, etc. I give examples of some of these diverse end user characteristics and the need to better incorporate them into requirements engineering, design, implementation, testing, and defect reporting activities in software engineering. I report on some of our work trying to address some of these issues, including: use of personas to better characterise diverse end user characteristics; extending requirements and design models to capture diverse end user needs; analysis of app reviews and JIRA logs to identify problems and ways developers try to address them; analysis of approaches to improve the accessibility of software designs for diverse end users; improved human-centric defect reporting approaches; and use of living lab co-design approaches to ensure end users are first class contributors during all phases of software development. I finish by outlining a research roadmap aiming to improve the incorporation of end user human aspects into software engineering.

Biography

John Grundy is Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor of Software Engineering at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. His five year Laureate programme on Human-centric Model-driven Software Engineering aims to address some of the deficiencies in current software development practices that fail to take account of diverse software developer human characteristics and diverse software end user human characteristics. He leads the Human-centric Software Engineering (HumaniSE) lab (https://www.monash.edu/it/humanise-lab) and has published over 500 refereed papers in software tools, visual modelling languages, model-driven software engineering, software architecture, requirements engineering, and software security. He is a Fellow of Automated Software Engineering and Fellow of Engineers Australia.

This talk is part of the New Zealand Software Innovation Seminar (SI^NZ) Series: https://softwareinnovation.nz/seminars/

Zoom Link: https://vuw.zoom.us/my/softwareinnovationnewzealand