Humphrey O. Obie

Hourieh Khalajzadeh, Mojtaba Shahin, Humphrey O. Obie et al.

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.

Conghui Li, Humphrey O. Obie, Hourieh Khalajzadeh

Human values are an important aspect of life and should be supported in ubiquitous technologies such as mobile applications (apps). There has been a lot of focus on fixing certain kinds of violation of human values, especially privacy, accessibility, and security while other values such as pleasure, tradition, and humility have received little focus. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between human values and Android API services and developed algorithms to detect potential violation of these values. We evaluated our algorithms with a manually curated ground truthset resulting in a high performance, and applied the algorithms to 10,000 apps. Our results show a correlation between violation of values and the presence of viruses. Our results also show that apps with the lowest number of installations contain more violation of values and the frequency of the violation of values was highest in social apps.

Humphrey O. Obie, Waqar Hussain, Xin Xia et al.

Ubiquitous technologies such as mobile software applications (mobile apps) have a tremendous influence on the evolution of the social, cultural, economic, and political facets of life in society. Mobile apps fulfil many practical purposes for users including entertainment, transportation, financial management, etc. Given the ubiquity of mobile apps in the lives of individuals and the consequent effect of these technologies on society, it is essential to consider the relationship between human values and the development and deployment of mobile apps. The many negative consequences of violating human values such as privacy, fairness or social justice by technology have been documented in recent times. If we can detect these violations in a timely manner, developers can look to better address them. To understand the violation of human values in a range of common mobile apps, we analysed 22,119 app reviews from Google Play Store using natural language processing techniques. We base our values violation detection approach on a widely accepted model of human values; the Schwartz theory of basic human values. The results of our analysis show that 26.5% of the reviews contained text indicating user perceived violations of human values. We found that benevolence and self-direction were the most violated value categories, and conformity and tradition were the least violated categories. Our results also highlight the need for a proactive approach to the alignment of values amongst stakeholders and the use of app reviews as a valuable additional source for mining values requirements.