Integrating Values into Mobile Software Engineering

ABSTRACT

Today's information systems are ubiquitous and delivered through "mobile apps" installed on smartphones. However, the growth of smartphone apps has had relatively little impact on the creation of apps that offer new affordances for young people from marginalised groups. One possible determining factor for this is the specific issue of value sensitivity. It is also evident that the role of software engineering is integral to addressing issues that require inter-connection and human interactions with systems. Thus, software engineering needs to integrate research in socio-technical systems, human behaviour and social concerns when used for design of mobile device based apps. Such integration requires a renewed focus on the notion of "Value".

A basic driver of human behaviour may at least in part be explained by (moral) values. Friedman defines value as: "what a person or group of people consider important in life". Values that are particularly pertinent to information systems include: ownership and property; privacy, freedom from bias, universal usability, trust, autonomy, informed consent, identity and others [2]. A notable contribution to understanding and accounting for values in the design process is the work by Friedman and her colleagues on Value Sensitive Design (VSD)[2]. Apps addressing social concerns are particularly prone to value sensitive concerns.

This work proposes that mobile app systems design and current SE practice does not incorporate any theoretical perspective of value as a first class representation. In particular, apps targeted for social good need software engineering guidance as current approaches to non-functional requirements are insufficient. This paper will present the outcomes of a research study that developed and deployed a mobile app for use by young people and their caseworkers in youth offending teams in the UK youth justice domain (http://www.mayot.mdx.ac.uk). The project raised requirements on design methods to incorporate the voice of stakeholders with respect to privacy and other moral value issues. The research was conducted "in the wild" and the app was deployed and evaluated in three case study sites.

Several contributions are made: we will present our app; the novel design processes; and some of our evaluation outcomes. Critically, we will expose some of the key research challenges arising from this work as we integrated value sensitive concerns into our co-design processes. We discuss the implications for mobile software engineering practice particularly in the context of non functional requirements. In doing so, we will refer to our prior published at ICSE 2015 [1] and our current work on further empirical evaluation of the app in 12 other case study organisations.

References

1. Balbir S. Barn, Ravinder Barn, and Franco Raimondi. On the role of value sensitive concerns in software engineering practice. In 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE Companion, 2015.
2. Batya Friedman. Value-sensitive design. Interactions, 3(6):16--23, 1996.