"Affects" of User Involvement in Software Development
Didar Zowghi · 2018
For more than four decades, it has been widely accepted that user involvement (UI) during software system development is essential and that it contributes to system success. However, when the relationship between user involvement and system success (UI-SS) was empirically evaluated by many researchers, the results reported were not always positive [1]. Barki and Hartwick [2] defined user involvement as a "Sub-jective psychological state reflecting the importance and personal relevance of a system to the user", and user participation "a set of behaviors or activities performed by users in the system de-velopment process". So UI is related to the attitude and affects that users exhibit during software development. The UI-SS relationship has been studied from various per-spectives in software development, that is, psychological, mana-gerial, political, cultural, or methodological. Viewed from any perspective, the main objective of user involvement or participation is to achieve the benefits that would ultimately be used in measuring system success. The success of software projects cannot always be measured in terms of cost, schedule and quality. Without social acceptance, the project can still be considered a failure. UI is seen as one of the means to achieve the social acceptance among the users. That is why 'user satisfaction' is one of the highly cited factors for measuring system success [1]. Users who feel involved in software development will exhibit positive affects and perceive the system as more useful, hence more likely to be satisfied with the system and socially accept it. Users' satisfaction with their involvement and with the re-sulting system are found to be mutually constituted, while the level of this satisfaction can fluctuate and evolve throughout different stages of software development process [3]. User satis-faction can also be perceived as a response driven by a pleasant experience from using a system. Our study of the problems and challenges of UI in software development [3], revealed 7 main classes of problems specifically associated to users: motivation; attitudes; expectations; expertise; appreciation of, or resistance to, change; cooperation; and users' perceptions of the development team. All but one of these challenges, strictly speaking, are related to affects. That is why studying affects in software development is very important. In our extensive study of UI in the last 6 years, we have discovered that if users are satisfied or dissatisfied with their involvement (process) during early phases of software development (e.g. requirements engineering), this will eventually contribute to their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the system (product) respectively [4, 5]. User satisfaction or dissatisfaction with their involvement is not static and is subject to change through-out software development process [6]. We found that the dy-namic UI management strategy and effective user representation are critical for dealing with the issues and challenges of UI. In our exploratory longitudinal study of UI in software de-velopment and the analysis of a very large amount of qualitative data, we learned that user involvement has a Good, a Bad and an Ugly side to it. Merely involving users is not always going to result in system success. UI is a double edged sword and if not handled carefully, it can cause more damage than benefit [4, 5]. The degree and extent of user involvement must be carefully planned and managed. Finally, our observation of two significant case studies that will be presented in this keynote, revealed that having a seat at the table is not the same as having a voice; having a voice is not the same as being heard; being heard is not the same as having influence on the outcomes. Ultimately, "affects", positive or negative, can play a major role in indicating user satisfaction or dissatisfaction in software development.