Occupational stress refers to job‐related uneasiness and anxiety, which affect people's emotional or physical health. Although occupational stress has been studied in several industries, it has ...remained largely unexplored in software developers, particularly in emerging economies such as Mexico. In this work, we propose a set of measures for supporting the assessment of occupational stress in software developers, which concurs with the types of tasks performed by software developers daily. For this, we first identified several stressors found in the literature. Then, we carried out 10 semi‐structured interviews with novice software developers to further understand stressors at the workplace. Afterwards, we conducted a study with 30 novice software developers for associating stress with workplace measures. From our work, we identified the workload, mental work fatigue, and work distraction as relevant measures associated with a certain level of stress in software developers. Our results suggest that some indicators can be used to monitor measures that are associated with occupational stress in software developers.
In this work, the results of usability and user experience (UX) evaluation of a serious video game for the cognitive stimulation and motor rehabilitation of the upper limb of the elderly are ...presented. The serious game includes features that allow (1) performing cooperative therapy exercises between two patients, (2) remote session configuration therapy, and (3) monitoring/analyzing the sessions’ results by the therapist. An evaluation of the game with 16 older adults provides evidence about how the tool is perceived by participants, who embraced it as stimulating, useful, usable and even fun, and which impacts in therapy compliance and acceptability by the elderly. In addition, through an in depth analysis of the participants’ performance and observed emotions, as well as their self-report, we determined which engagement attributes are present in the game. Finally, we also found evidence that suggests that the participants’ skill level and the game difficulty level rather than just a good performance on the game are key factors that influence their enjoyment and frustration.
Agile software development is one of the most important development paradigms these days. However, there are still some challenges to consider to reduce problems during the documentation process. ...Some assistive methods have been created to support developers in their documentation activities. In this regard, Natural Language Processing (NLP) can be used to create various related tools (such as assistants) to help with the documentation process. This paper presents the current state-of-the-art NLP techniques used in the agile development documentation process. A mapping review was done to complete the objective, the search strategy is used to obtain relevant studies from ScienceDirect, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, SpringerLink, and Willey. The search results after inclusion and exclusion criteria application left 47 relevant papers identified. These papers were analyzed to obtain the most used NLP techniques and NLP toolkits. The toolkits were also classified by the kind of techniques that are available in each of them. In addition, the behavior of the research area over time was analyzed using the relevant paper found by year. We found that performance measuring methods are not standardized, and, in consequence, the works are not easily comparable. In general, the number of related works and its distribution per year shows a growing trend of the works related to this topic in recent years; this indicates that the adoption of NLP techniques to improve agile methodologies is increasing.
Abstract
Cigarette smoking remains an important health concern and is still a leading cause of preventable mortality. Nicotine is the substance responsible for sustained tobacco use and dependence. ...Identification of biomarkers underlying nicotine dependence behavior is important to identify people at risk for this dependence. In the present study, we identified biochemical and genetic biomarkers of nicotine dependence detected by the Fagerström Test for Nicotine Dependence (FTDN
)
in Mexican smokers. The nicotine metabolites nicotine‐N′‐oxide, trans‐3′‐hydroxycotinine‐glucuronide (3HC‐O‐Gluc), and nicotine‐N‐Gluc (Gluc) were useful to differentiate nicotine‐dependent from non‐dependent subjects (
p
< .0001) with an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.7818. Genetic variants in
CYP2A6
,
FMO3
, and
UGT2B7
(rs2431413, rs28363545, and rs7439326, respectively) were associated with nicotine dependence (
p
= .03,
p
= .01,
p
= .01, respectively). Variations in the enzymatic activity of CYP2A6 were associated with altered nicotine‐N′‐oxide and 3HC‐O‐Gluc levels. Decreased urinary levels of 3HC‐O‐Gluc and increased nicotine‐N′‐oxide were associated with a decrease in the functional activity of CYP2A6. A strong positive correlation was observed between the ratio of urinary 3HC/cotinine, a measure of CYP2A6 activity, and the levels of 3HC‐O‐Gluc (
p
< .0001,
r
= .6835), while a strong negative correlation was observed with nicotine‐N′‐oxide (
p
< .0001,
r
= .6522) in nicotine‐dependent subjects. No correlations were observed in non‐nicotine‐dependent subjects. These data suggest that particular urinary nicotine metabolites and genetic variants involved in nicotine metabolism are useful to identify subjects with nicotine dependence in the Mexican population.
Agile global software engineering challenges architectural knowledge (AK) management since face-to-face interactions are preferred over comprehensive documentation, which causes AK loss over time. ...The AK condensation concept was proposed to reduce AK losing, using the AK shared through unstructured electronic media. A crucial part of this concept is a classification mechanism to ease AK recovery in the future. We developed a Slack complement as a classification mechanism based on social tagging, which recommends tags according to a chat/message topic, using natural language processing (NLP) techniques. We evaluated two tagging modes: NLP-assisted versus alphabetical auto-completion, in terms of correctness and time to select a tag. Fifty-two participants used the complement emulating an agile and global scenario and gave us their complement’s perceptions about usefulness, ease of use, and work integration. Messages tagged through NLP recommendations showed fewer semantic errors, and participants spent less time selecting a tag. They perceived the component as very usable, useful, and easy to be integrated into the daily work. These results indicated that a tag recommendation system is necessary to classify the shared AK accurately and quickly. We will improve the NLP techniques to evaluate AK condensation in a long-term test as future work.
In the teaching-learning process under the competency-based educational model, the instructor is a facilitator and seeks to generate a flexible and adaptable environment for student learning. One of ...the first tasks of the facilitator is the structuring of didactic planning. Didactic planning includes strategies for teaching and learning, evidence gathering, and choice of evaluation instruments. In this paper, we propose a framework based on natural language processing techniques with the support of an ontology grounded in the experience of instructors and university level course plans in the information systems area. We employ Bloom’s taxonomy in the ontology design, producing an ascending structure for didactic planning, which allows the student to learn gradually. The developed framework can analyze the key elements that a didactic plan must contain and identify inter-related areas. Evaluation results with Cohen’s kappa coefficient between expert judgement and our framework show that is possible to assist instructors in structuring their didactic planning. Out of the nine processes analyzed with the framework, an almost perfect kappa level was achieved in five processes, a substantial level in three processes, and a moderate level for one process.
The adoption of agile methods is a trend in global software development (GSD), but may result in many challenges. One important challenge is architectural knowledge (AK) management, since agile ...developers prefer sharing knowledge through face-to-face interactions, while in GSD the preferred manner is documents. Agile knowledge-sharing practices tend to predominate in GSD companies that practice agile development (AGSD), leading to a lack of documents, such as architectural designs, data models, deployment specifications, etc., resulting in the loss of AK over time, i.e., it vaporizes.
In a previous study, we found that there is important AK in the log files of unstructured textual electronic media (UTEM), such as instant messengers, emails, forums, etc., which are the preferred means employed in AGSD to contact remote teammates. The objective of this paper is to present and evaluate a proposal with which to recover AK from UTEM logs. We developed and evaluated a prototype that implements our proposal in order to determine its feasibility.
The evaluation was performed by conducting a study with agile/global developers and students, who used the prototype and different UTEM to execute tasks that emulate common situations concerning AGSD teams’ lack of documentation during development phases.
Our prototype was considered a useful, usable and unobtrusive tool when retrieving AK from UTEM logs. The participants also preferred our prototype when searching for AK and found AK faster with the prototype than with UTEM when the origin of the AK required was unknown.
The participants’ performance and perceptions when using our prototype provided evidence that our proposal could reduce AK vaporization in AGSD environments. These results encourage us to evaluate our proposal in a long-term test as future work.
Nowadays, software development companies use agile methodologies to increase the speed and flexibility required by unpredictable working environments and streamline the software delivery process. ...Agile methodologies emphasize the software engineers’ interactions rather than rigid software development processes. Therefore, agile software development processes (e.g., implementing user stories) should consider software engineers’ affective states since these influence agile software project activities (e.g., team composition or decision-making). We conducted a systematic mapping review following the guidelines of Petersen, K. and Kitchenham, B. to answer our research question: “What affective states influence agile software engineers’ performance and developed software quality?”. We retrieved over 16,000 articles published between January 2010 and September 2021 and after applying selection criteria, 24 primary articles were identified. The results show that the affective states of software engineers influence the activities of the software project and the software development process. Furthermore, we found that there is a lack of well-defined and standard metrics to study the influence of software engineers’ affective states on their performance and the quality of the resulting software. Finally, we concluded that studying and understanding the affective states of software engineers in agile environments is crucial to achieve their well-being at work and improve their performance.
•Metrics to measure performance should include the software engineer’ affective states.•The affective data collection methods most used in the agile literature are intrusive.•Most of the affective states reported in the agile literature are negative.•Agile software engineers’ affective states influence agile software project activities.•Agile Engineering does not have well-defined performance metrics considering emotions.
•Co-designing healthcare apps with caregivers fosters group endorsement.•Co-designing healthcare apps with caregivers guarantees the usefulness of the apps.•Feedback from participants (un)involved in ...the design of healthcare apps is valuable.•Requirements should be matched with the peculiarities of the Alzheimer's condition.
This paper presents Alzheed, a mobile application for monitoring patients with Alzheimer's disease at day centers as well as a set of design recommendations for the development of healthcare mobile applications. The Alzheed project was conducted at Day Center “Dorita de Ojeda” that is focused on the care of patients with Alzheimer's disease.
A software design methodology based on participatory design was employed for the design of Alzheed. This methodology is both iterative and incremental and consists of two main iterative stages: evaluation of low-fidelity prototypes and evaluation of high-fidelity prototypes. Low-fidelity prototypes were evaluated by 11 day center's healthcare professionals (involved in the design of Alzheed), whereas high-fidelity prototypes were evaluated using a questionnaire based on the technology acceptance model (TAM) by the same healthcare professionals plus 30 senior psychology undergraduate students uninvolved in the design of Alzheed.
Healthcare professional participants perceived Alzheed as extremely likely to be useful and extremely likely to be usable, whereas senior psychology undergraduate students perceived Alzheed as quite likely to be useful and quite likely to be usable. Particularly, the median and mode of the TAM questionnaire were 7 (extremely likely) for healthcare professionals and 6 (quite likely) for psychology students (for both constructs: perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use). One-sample Wilcoxon signed-rank tests were performed to confirm the significance of the median for each construct.
From the experience of designing Alzheed, it can be concluded that co-designing with healthcare professionals leads to (i) fostering group endorsement, which prevents resistance to change and (ii) helps to meet the needs of both healthcare professionals and patients, guaranteeing the usefulness of the application. In addition, evaluation of mobile healthcare applications by users involved and uninvolved in the application's design process helps to improve the ease of use of the application.
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