In: A. Editor, B. Coeditor (eds.): Proceedings of the XYZ Workshop, Location, Country, DD-MMM-YYYY, published at http://ceur-ws.org
1.1
Our lives are being transformed by innovative software applications with important social, environmental, and economic implications. For instance, context-aware software systems can be found in di erent domains such as health-care, telecommunication, transportation, etc. It is expected that in the near future software-intensive systems will behave autonomously thanks to the continuous sensing and monitoring. In this proposal, given the complexity of this kind of systems, and the social implications behind emerging wearable sensing technologies, we aim to empirically investigate some quality attributes that contribute to the social sustainability from a consumer perspective.
In a previous work [
In this live study proposal, we start from the hypothesis that users perceive the importance of some software
requirements in di erent ways due to their di erent pro les (e.g. background, preferences, experiences,
personality) [
Therefore, in order to investigate how users understand and perceive the security and satisfaction of
contextaware software applications, that are built based on the HAPPYNESS framework [
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In this section, we introduce the scenario that illustrates the context of the use of happyParking, an application built based on the HAPPYNESS framework, that we plan to use it in our live study proposal.
Frank lives in a city where the amount of parking spaces per unit is becoming scarce. Given the di culty of nding a parking space, Frank uses a mobile application called happyParking. The application uses multiple input sources of contextual information to provide a certain degree of probability of nding a parking spot in di erent locations. happyParking is empowered by HAPPYNESS, and Frank uses the E4-Wristband1 for monitoring emotional data at runtime, HAPPYNESS determine the actual QoS levels of happyParking services from a user perspective, increasing in this way our awareness of a potential issue with the services, what could eventually lead to actions addressing the issue. 3 3.1
In this study, we start from the hypothesis that educational background and type of personality are key factors
that can in uence on the perceived importance of some quality requirements [
From this goal, the following research questions are derived: RQ1: How service consumers perceive the importance of security and satisfaction of a context-aware softwareintensive system? RQ2: Do the educational background and personality in uence on the importance perceived of security and satisfaction of context-aware software applications from a service consumer perspective? Type and relevance of study for research and/or for practice.- This study is performed through a survey (online-questionnaire), and its objective is to test the hypothesis formulated above. 3.2
Response variables.- Security and satisfaction are operationalised regarding: i) the perceived importance of
quality attributes, which can be measured by means of 6 items formulated in 5-points ordinal scale (from "not
important" to "very important"); ii) the level of agreement on security requirements, which can reach values
from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree); and iii) the perceived recommendation measured with the Net
Promoter score [
Factors.- The mobile application that needs wearable sensors is identi ed as a variable that could a ect the
response variables. Our treatment is the happyParking and the E4wristband device. Personality is another
important variable identi ed in our study, which will be measured using the Big Five Inventory questionnaire
(BFI) [
Pro le of the intended subjects.- We plan for 40 participants as a minimum number of subjects to conduct the survey. Students, senior researchers, and practitioners are very welcome. Prior knowledge of security is not required. We choose REFSQ'19 to run this online survey thanks to the knowledge in requirements engineering (RE) of REFSQ's attendees.
Bene ts to the subjects of participating in the study.1https://www.empatica.com/en-eu/research/e4/
Given requirements are the key leverage point for practitioners (e.g. software architects, testers) who want to design software systems with an acceptable quality level, we think that this survey might bene t to the participants by getting: knowledge on how to elicit requirements (e.g. security, trust) of context-aware applications that are harder to be perceived by end-users. experience in running empirical studies with the exploitation of video-demos as a medium in requirements engineering. access to the instruments such as an online version of the BFI questionnaire, which could be used for pro ling participants in any further human-based empirical studies. 3.4
The study is composed of three parts (see Figure1): (i) a pre-questionnaire that aims to collect demographic, educational background and personality information, (ii) the online questionnaire that gathers service consumer perceptions on security and satisfaction requirements of context-aware applications, (iii) and a post-questionnaire that aims to evaluate the quality of the live study.
Instrumentation.- The instruments to be used in the study are a demographic questionnaire (e.g., sex, age), an educational background questionnaire (e.g., educational degree, domain expertise), a personality test, animated demonstration videos, and a web-based questionnaire designed to assess the service consumer perceptions on security and satisfaction requirements.
Questionnaire (see Figure 1) consists of two sub-parts: First one: items that correspond to security and satisfaction quality attributes listed in Table 1, these items (i.e., de nitions and examples of quality attributes) are formulated as questions on an ordinal scale to measure the rst perception about the importance of security and satisfaction quality attributes according to the rst video2.
Second one: questions regarding the level of agreement on security requirements (according to the second video3) are formulated. Additionally, questions on an ordinal scale for the re-evaluating importance of security and satisfaction quality attributes are formulated. We include also question on a ordinal scale for collecting data regarding the overall satisfaction. 3.4.1
The procedure of the study is summarized in Figure 1, which includes the estimated time required for each activity. A rst version of the online questionnaire that we plan to use can be found at https://goo.gl/forms/ 65pJEjz4RroYDq153.
2https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ7Og8hTtXk 3https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDYqzzGSw8s
Following our previous experience when eliciting requirements from software recon guration [
In the rest of the section, we introduce the plan of data collection and analysis related to Stage 2. Execution of data collection.- The data will be collected through an online survey, nobody will be obligated to participate, only volunteers will participate of it. To assure that, a consent document will be signed by participants before performing the live study, in this document we will brie y explain con dentiality and privacy terms.
Execution of data validation.- To understand participants' personality, we use the Big Five Inventory (BFI) questionnaire. Responses related to demographic, educational background and personality can be used as inputs to identify user pro le. User pro les could allow us to improve the understanding about diverse user behaviours and its implication in the perception of security and satisfaction requirements of context-aware applications. 5
The main threats to validity concern internal, construct and external validity [
Construct validity: It concerns generalizing the result of the experiment to the concept or theory behind the
experiment.. In order to mitigate the threat related to the following two social factors: Hypothesis guessing, we
do not reveal the research goal before the study. Evaluation apprehension, as some people are afraid of being
evaluated/tested, the completion of both personality test and online questionnaire are going to be anonymous.
Regarding the threats related to the design of the study: mono-operation bias, as we include only one treatment
(happyparking app), the study could be under-representing the identi ed constructs (perceptions on security and
satisfaction). To mitigate this threat, we carefully selected the software domain (IoT applications for the smart
parking sector), which we think it is enough representative for measuring our two response variables. Moreover,
It is important to remark that we explore both variables, by formulating questions at least in two di erent scales,
such is shown in Table 1. Also we considered other relevant factors as personality, which is going to be measured
by means of the BFI questionnaire, de ned and validated in the psychology eld [
External validity: concern the generalization of the ndings beyond the validation settings. This threat is partially mitigated by the fact that REFSQ attendees are diverse in terms of personality and educational background such as master/PhD students, software architects, requirements engineers, business analysts, etc. However, a further replication, involving participants with non-technical background such is described in stage 3 of our study, is necessary. 6
Nelly Condori-Fernandez is an assistant professor at the Universidade da Coruna(Spain) and research
associate of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands). Her main empirically-driven research focuses
on topics related to quality requirements prioritization and requirements validation. She has a particular
interest in applying Human Computer Interaction technologies to support requirements engineering activities.
Her research interests also include software sustainability design and assessment with special emphasis on social
and technical aspects. She executed three empirical studies in the live study track of REFSQ, whose results
have been published in di erent venues (e.g. [
Denisse Mun~ante is an assistant professor and research associate at the engineering school ESTIA (France).
Her main empirically-driven research focuses on decision-making for requirements prioritization. Her research
interest also includes security information, self-adaptive software, and model-driven engineering. She executed
two empirical studies, one of them was published in RE'17 [
Franci Suni Lopez is a research associate of the San Pablo Catholic University of Arequipa, Peru. He has a master in computer science. His main research focuses on using human emotions to empower the self-adaptation capability of software services. His research interest also includes software engineering for mobile development and self-adaptive software.