Final published version
Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
<mark>Journal publication date</mark> | 1/03/2023 |
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<mark>Journal</mark> | IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering |
Issue number | 3 |
Volume | 49 |
Number of pages | 18 |
Pages (from-to) | 973-990 |
Publication Status | Published |
Early online date | 26/04/22 |
<mark>Original language</mark> | English |
The study of human values in software engineering (SE) is increasingly recognised as a fundamental human-centric issue of SE decision making. However, values studies in SE still face a number of issues, including the difficulty of eliciting values in a systematic and structured way, the challenges of measuring and tracking values over time, and the lack of practice-based understanding of values among software practitioners. This paper aims to help address these issues by: 1) outlining a research framework that supports a systematic approach to values elicitation, analysis, and understanding; 2) introducing tools and techniques that help elicit and measure values during SE decision making processes in a systematic way; and 3) applying such tools to a month-long research sprint co-designed with an industry partner and conducted with 27 software practitioners. The case study builds on lessons from an earlier pilot (12 participants) and combines in-situ observations with the use of two values-informed tools: the Values Q-Sort (V-QS), and the Values-Retro. The V-QS adapts values-studies instruments to the SE context, the Values-Retro adapts existing SE techniques to values theory. We distil implications for research and practice in ten lessons learned.