HumaniSE: Approaches to Achieve More Human-Centric Software Engineering

A common problem with many existing software systems and the approaches to engineering them is their lack of the human aspects of their target end users. People are different - with diverse characteristics including age, gender, ethnicity, physical and mental challenges, personality, technical proficiency, emotional reactions to software systems, socio-economic status, educational attainment, language, and so on. In this paper we describe our work at looking to better consider these characteristics by incorporation of human aspects throughout the software engineering lifecycle. We are developing a co-creational living lab approach to better collect human aspects in the software requirements. We are using domain-specific visual languages, themselves a more human-centric modelling approach, to capture these diverse human aspects of target software systems. We are working on incorporating these human aspects into design models to support improved model-driven engineering, and thereby to better support both code generation and run-time adaptation to different end user human characteristics. Finally we are working on better ways to support continuous evaluation of human aspects in the produced software, and to provide improved feedback of user reported defects to developers.