Diverse End User Requirements

Abstract: As part of our larger research effort to improve support for diverse end user human-centric aspects during software development, we wanted to better understand how developers currently go about addressing these challenging human-centric aspects of their end users in contemporary software development projects. We wanted to find out which are the key end user human-centric aspects that software developers currently find challenging to address, and how they currently go about trying to address diverse end user human-centric aspects. We wanted to find out what sorts of end user human-centric aspects they tend to encounter, which ones they view as more important and which more challenging to address, what techniques (if any) they currently use to address (some of) them, and where they perceive further research in this area could be done to provide them practical support. To this end we carried out a detailed online survey of developers and development team managers, receiving 60 usable responses. We interviewed 12 developers and managers from a range of different practice domains, role specialisations and experience levels to explore further details about issues.