HuFo 2019

4th International Workshop on Human Factors in Software Processes (HUFO2019)

In conjunction with PROFES 2019 (https://profes2019.upc.edu), November 27, 2019 Barcelona, Spain

• Website: https://hufo2019.serandp.com

Summary

Overview Software development is a human intensive activity whatever the underlying production process it is based on. Though both software engineering (SE) and human-computer interaction (HCI) communities aim towards creating better software products, the two communities are still far from being synergic while they could both gain from a better integration. Recent efforts have contributed to increase the synergy between SE and HCI. Nevertheless, this has not led to expected results and impacts with respect to software processes. Software product industry emphasizes the importance of contact with users and customers in order to understand requirements both regarding the functionality and the usability of software products. At the same time, multi layered software architectures are pursued in order to have robust and evolvable software products, according to the customers’ needs, even if they were not properly taken in to account at the beginning of the development process. One might expect that such issues would lead to emphasize the core importance of human factors in software. Unfortunately this has not been the case. Indeed, recent literature has pointed out how in most empirical evaluations only a small number of works include human participants. Moreover, there is still little experience in conducting empirical studies with human participants. Papers discussing topics on challenges and best practices of HCI in the evaluation of software processes and practices as well as software products are welcome.

Goals and Topics 

The overall goal of this interdisciplinary workshop is to raise the level of engagement and discussion about human factors in software product engineering and processes in order to identify opportunities to improve the quality of scientific results and improvements on human aspects of software product development. A further goal of the workshop is to identify opportunities to improve the quality of scientific discourse and progress on human aspects within software processes, as well as to identify opportunities able to educate researchers about how to conduct sound human-centered evaluations in the context of software engineering.
To achieve these goals, it is important to bring together researchers and practitioners who face the problem of integrating human factors in software processes and have tried effective methods to resolve it. The workshop will provide a forum to discuss the following research questions:

• What are the key methods that allow the integration of human factors in software processes
• What methods do current software development teams use to engage users in software processes?
• How can the level of human factor involvement be objectively verified during and after software development?
• How to educate researchers on performing human-centered evaluations in software engineering processes?

Submissions

Authors are invited to submit a full or short paper using the Springer LNCS format. The submissions may describe experiences, ideas, innovations, as well as concerns related to the integration of human factors in software processes. About the type of paper submission, the authors have 2 options:

1.  Short papers: describing preliminary work, initial research results or vision papers proposing innovative approach, methods used in actual development processes (up to 7 pages).
2. Full papers: reporting more substantial research or development work. The full papers should describe more mature research providing new knowledge into the problem areas described in the workshop themes (up to 16 pages).

Papers will be selected by the Program Committee considering their quality, topic relevance, innovation, and potentials to foster discussion. We aim at an interdisciplinary meeting, thus each submitted paper will be reviewed by two reviewers with different backgrounds providing authors with the information to make their contribution relevant and appealing for the workshop’s audience. At least one author from every accepted paper must plan to attend the workshop and present. The papers can be submitted at: Easychair The authors will be notified and the accepted papers will be published in the main Springer LNCS volume together with the main conference papers. We plan to contact key HCI/SE journals about their willingness to produce a special issue on human factors in software processes based on the best papers presented at the workshop.

Organizing Committee

• Silvia Abrahao, Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (UPV), Spain sabrahao[at]dsic.upv.es
• Maria Teresa Baldassarre, Università degli Studi di Bari Aldo Moro, Italy -mariateresa.baldassarre[at]uniba.it
• Fabio Q.B. da Silva, Federal University of Pernambuco, Recife Spain – fabio[at]cin.ufpe.br
• Simone Romano, University of Basilicata, Potenza, Italy,  simone.romano[at]unibas.it