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How are diverse end-user human-centric issues discussed on GitHub?

conference contribution
posted on 2024-11-03, 15:11 authored by Hourieh Khalajzadeh, Mojtaba ShahinMojtaba Shahin, Humphrey Obie, John Grundy
Many software systems fail to meet the needs of the diverse end-users in society and are prone to pose problems, such as accessibility and usability issues. Some of these problems (partially) stem from the failure to consider the characteristics, limitations, and abilities of diverse end-users during software development. We refer to this class of problems as human-centric issues. Despite their importance, there is a limited understanding of the types of human-centric issues encountered by developers. In-depth knowledge of these human-centric issues is needed to design software systems that better meet their diverse end-users' needs. This paper aims to provide insights for the software development and research communities on which human-centric issues are a topic of discussion for developers on GitHub. We conducted an empirical study by extracting and manually analysing 1,691 issue comments from 12 diverse projects, ranging from small to large-scale projects, including projects designed for challenged end-users, e.g., visually impaired and dyslexic users. Our analysis shows that eight categories of human-centric issues are discussed by developers. These include Inclusiveness, Privacy & Security, Compatibility, Location & Language, Preference, Satisfaction, Emotional Aspects, and Accessibility. Guided by our findings, we highlight some implications and possible future paths to further understand and incorporate human-centric issues in software development to be able to design software that meets the needs of diverse end users in society.

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Related Materials

  1. 1.
    DOI - Is published in 10.1145/3510458.3513014
  2. 2.
    ISBN - Is published in 9781450392273 (urn:isbn:9781450392273)

Start page

79

End page

89

Total pages

11

Outlet

ICSE-SEIS '22: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society

Name of conference

ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society

Publisher

ACM

Place published

New York, NY, United States

Start date

2022-05-21

End date

2022-05-29

Language

English

Former Identifier

2006119035

Esploro creation date

2023-04-16

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