The Design of Adaptive Acquisition of Users Feedback: an Empirical Study

Users' feedback is a main source of knowledge on how users perceive the role of software in meeting their requirements. Collectively, such feedback helps shaping software autonomous and semi-autonomous adaptation decisions of what is called Social Adaptation. It also helps developers to identify loci in the system where an evolution should be introduced in the next release. Despite this role of users' feedback, there is a lack of systematic engineering approaches on how to design its acquisition mechanisms. In this paper, we observe that the acquisition of feedback should be itself adaptive to the context of use. We conduct an empirical study following a mixed-method sequential exploratory approach to explore the main drivers of such adaptation and understand users' attitude when being asked to provide feedback. Our findings are meant to enrich the knowledge base for developers and researchers in users-centric, or crowd-centric, adaptation. It also highlights areas of study for a future research in the area.