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PublicationInforming on Climate-Friendly Novel Mobility Measures: Development of the Serious Game 'MiniLautern' and Analysis of Player Feedback( 2023)Climate change affects many aspects of our lives. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase quality of life, novel solutions need to be implemented. The digital transformation can support this direction. In this paper, we share experiences from the transformation of an urban district and show how digital solutions can support climate-friendly behavior. Our focus is on a Serious Game we developed, called 'MiniLautern', where players implement novel mobility solutions and have to address the concerns and needs of predefined stakeholders in order to maximize their score regarding stakeholders' happiness and positive environmental impact. We analyzed player feedback in order to understand better whether such a Serious Game is suitable for communicating the positive effects of novel mobility measures and researchers' efforts to address stakeholder concerns. Until now, the game MiniLautern has been completed by around 160 players, who have provided a total of 72 star ratings and answered about 20 questionnaires. So far, the reception of the game has been predominantly positive. Players like the core concept of matching novel mobility measures to stakeholder concerns, but would like to have expanded game mechanics, a larger solution space, and deeper interaction with the game.
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PublicationSmart City District Simulator - How we made a Virtual Smart City District Come Alive( 2022)
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PublicationOn the road towards a smart Urban district supported by a mock platform( 2021)The world is becoming more and more connected, which is also true for smart cities. The digital transformation is making rapid progress, and part of this are digital ecosystems, consisting of a platform and digital services that support several stakeholders with digital services. In the context of smart cities, we are currently developing a climate-neutral smart urban district and use digital solutions to address topics such as mobility, energy, smart home, and communication among the citizens involved. However, new ideas for services are challenging to invent, develop, and test in our situation, as this particular urban district is currently under construction. This is why we have developed a mock platform, which makes it much easier to evaluate new ideas fast, as qualities of a productive environment such as security or performance are not as highly relevant as an easy-to-use environment. We present details of our mock platform and our experiences in applying it to date. Such a solution is also beneficial for other practitioners and researchers in other smart cities and smart urban districts who are developing a digital ecosystem with new digital services.
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PublicationHow to gather requirements from the crowd with hackathons( 2020)[Context and motivation] Today's software systems become more and more complex, especially when we think about connected systems such as cyber-physical systems or digital ecosystems. Customers thereby demand flawless apps and have several needs in mind that such solutions should provide. If these are not fulfilled, they do not use the solution. In such connected environments, usually many different stakeholders exist that all have different requirements. [Question/ problem] In complex cyber-physical systems, the manifold requirements and possible solutions can overstrain requirements engineers and developers. What are ways to consider needs and requirements from different stakeholders? How can such input be used for requirements engineering? [Principal ideas/results] In order to gather ideas, issues and requirements from several different stakeholders, we propose to consider hackathons besides well-known and established requirements engineering methods. With these, one gets to know his stakeholders, get real needs from his stakeholders, and get early ideas and prototypical solutions. [Contribution] We share our experiences with two hackathons we performed in a research project that aims at developing a climate neutral city district with supporting digital services. We discuss opportunities and challenges and how results might be used for requirements engineering.
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PublicationApp-Verbesserung durch Messung von Emotionen( 2019)In diesem Beitrag, der sich an Praktiker in der Industrie und Forscher richtet, die an der App-Entwicklung mit ihren agilen und kurzen Entwicklungszyklen interessiert sind, möchten wir über die Idee eines emotions-basierten Testansatzes berichten. Apps sollen Nutzer begeistern und durch eine hohe Bedienbarkeit geprägt sein, gleichzeitig aber schnell und günstig entwickelt werden. Unsere Idee ist, mittels der Tiefenkamera von modernen Mobilgeräten Emotionen eines Nutzers während der Interaktion mit einer App zu erkennen, um so Schlüsse für Verbesserungen zu ziehen. Dies ermöglicht eine gezielte Prüfung von Anforderungen, um deren Widerspiegeln der Nutzerbedürfnisse zu gewährleisten.
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PublicationDon't Worry, Be Happy - Exploring Users' Emotions During App Usage for Requirements Engineering( 2019)User feedback and usage data are a valuable source of knowledge for requirements engineering (RE) and software evolution. Recent research in RE has focused on the acquisition and analysis of such user input. However, we argue that important information complementing existing data has been neglected, namely users' emotions shown during app usage, which provide insight into how users experience the app. We are aware that tracking users' emotions at large-scale might be challenging. So far, emotion tracking is often applied in lab and test settings only. We envision an unobtrusive emotion tracker running on the users' smartphones in their regular usage context. However, we do not know whether such an approach would be accepted by the app users and which requirements such an emotion-tracking solution would need to fulfill. In this paper, we present the first results from our exploratory interview study with eight mobile app users regarding their preferences and concerns with respect to emotion tracking. Early results are encouraging and suggest that app users tend to accept emotion tracking during app usage, having only minor privacy concerns. In this paper, we discuss our ongoing research, including the long-term direction and prospects of considering users' emotions for RE.
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PublicationOn the Road to Enriching the App Improvement Process with Emotions( 2019)The success of an app depends on its acceptance by the users. This is closely related to a good user experience and fulfill-ment of the users' requirements. Recent research emphasizes the use of user feedback as part of the requirements engineering process. Analyzing emotions can play an important role in determining how users perceive a product. Therefore, we propose the idea of emotion tracking on the users' devices. We aim on a method for the verification and validation of software requirements. To get closer to this goal, we performed a study using the iPhone's TrueDepth Camera. The aim was to link muscular positions to emotions. In this work, we present a study with actors. We evaluated facial muscle recordings from 23 actors playing scenes from a popular TV show. Our analysis shows that deriving emotions with the help of the TrueDepth Camera appears to be a promising approach. We were able to generate an initial model for detecting basic emotions relative to a person's neutral face. This provides a first step towards automatically identifying the emotions of users while using an app. Such feedback could then be used as an additional source of information when it comes to subsequent app development activities.
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PublicationSupporting Rapid Product Changes through Emotional Tracking( 2019)Agile principles have led to short development cycles with rapid changes in requirements, especially for mobile apps. The success of apps highly depends on their acceptance by the users. However, testing user acceptance is usually costly and timeconsuming. This imposes a conflict between quality and agility. As current verification and validation methods for requirements do not always fit the demands for volatile requirements, we propose the idea of emotional tracking. In this positional paper, we present how the vision of tracking emotions shown by users while interacting with an app might be realized by using 3D sensing cameras in smartphones. We propose a plan for the technical and organizational process of emotional tracking on the user's device and the backend and an experiment setup to link muscular positions to emotions, to preserve user privacy. With emotional tracking, we provide a new method for verification and validation of software requirements. Our method can be used in parallel to development activities and combines quantitative usage data with users' feelings and emotions to get a fast and holistic idea of an app's user acceptance.
