Ensuring data privacy is a major challenge for software developers, especially in chatbots, where balancing privacy protection with response quality is key, given the need for conversation-driven development and data protection regulations. This research identifies privacy requirements and techniques for chatbot development through a literature review, privacy policy analysis, and a practitioner survey. The methodology includes a Systematic Literature Review (SLR), an adapted Gray Literature Review (GLR), privacy requirement formulation, and validation via a survey. Based on the SLR and GLR, eight privacy requirements are proposed, covering personal information protection, user authentication, access control, secure communication, database safety, user rights empowerment, decentralized storage, and reliable infrastructure. Survey results highlight foundational measures like secure communication and scalable infrastructures as priorities, while advanced measures such as decentralized storage or privacy rights implementation scored lower due to complexity and cost. Practitioners also stressed clarity and verifiability, citing gaps in definitions, examples, and validation criteria as challenges to adoption.

The conversational nature of chatbots poses challenges to designers since their development is different from other software and requires investigating new practices in the context of human-AI interaction and their impact on user experience. Therefore, this work aims to unveil text-based chatbot conversational practices alongside their impacts on users to build a web guide to support designers while conceiving conversations for chatbots. We have carried out a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to identify linguistic, visual, and interactive elements used in text-based chatbot conversational design. The SLR resulted in 40 selected studies that were reviewed and coded into a set of conversational guidelines that were evaluated through a survey. Respondents strongly agreed that applying the proposed guidelines in chatbot development would produce greater user satisfaction and user engagement and that the guide is usable, flexible, clear, and understandable, making it a great ally in building text-based chatbots with an improved user experience.

Requirements elicitation is a fundamental step in a software development process since it is at this stage that the software begins to be designed. In some situations, the problems related to the failure of the software development project are due to an incomplete requirements elicitation, resulting in solutions that do not understand all the necessary functionalities or do not incorporate innovation. Despite the various techniques offered by Requirements Engineering, situations such as the growing application market and the need for innovation further increase the importance of understanding the user’s different needs. In this paper, we investigated how the journey map and personas techniques are being used in requirements elicitation in both the literature and the industry, along with the advantages, disadvantages and challenges of using these techniques. We conducted systematic literature review to identify the personas and journey map techniques used in requirements elicitation in the literature and industry. In addition, we conducted a survey with 52 practitioners (software developers, users and managers) to investigate their perceptions of the use of journey maps and personas techniques in the requirements elicitation phase. Twenty-four primary studies were identified that address journey map and personas techniques in software requirements elicitation. In addition, most respondents stated that using these techniques facilitates understanding the requirements, providing better integration, collaboration and leveling of knowledge among the members of the software development teams. Our findings allow us to conclude that most of the software developers, users and managers that participated in the survey consider that the journey map and personas techniques are effective in helping understand the software requirements to be developed by the development teams.

Context: The use of Creativity and Design Thinking (C&DT) techniques favor the generation of new ideas based on the needs of users and stakeholders, and can support software developers during the process of requirements elicitation. Objectives: In this work, we aim to identify C&DT techniques to perform requirements elicitation proposed in the literature and in the industry and investigate the perception of software developers about using these techniques. Methods: We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) to identify the C&DT techniques in the literature and a regional survey with software development teams from several companies in Brazil to identify which techniques found in the literature are currently being used by organizations. The survey also investigated the level of knowledge that software developers have regarding the C&DT techniques, and whether they agree that the use of these techniques can help to achieve a more effective process of requirements elicitation. Results: In the SLR, we identified 86 C&DT techniques that support requirement elicitation activities. In the survey, most developers outlined that C&DT techniques facilitate requirements elicitation and stated that they have more knowledge and usage experience with DT techniques than creativity techniques. The most used DT techniques mentioned by survey participants were: interview, brainstorming, uses cases, activity analysis, user story, and rapid prototyping, whereas for creativity techniques were: analogies, creativity workshops, focus group, questions list, clarification, none and combining ideas. Conclusions: The results showed that despite the existence of a large number of techniques in the literature, the developers’ lack of knowledge about these techniques makes them not used in the industry. However, the developers’ responses showed that the use of C&DT techniques helps to make requirements elicitation more effective.

This Research Full Paper studies the impact of using Calango language in the introductory learning of algorithms and computer programming by Brazilian engineering undergraduates. Calango is an educational multi-platform tool designed to facilitate algorithm learning and provide a simple syntax that enables developing advanced logic, so that students concentrate on logic without worrying about language details, considering its based on Portuguese pseudocode commands. A survey was conducted to evaluate if the teaching methods and tools used in the engineering introductory computer programming course were helpful. The questionnaire was applied at the end of four consecutive semesters of lecturing the course, and five questions were selected to analyze Calango's influence in the learning process. Approximately 95% of the participants agreed that Calango should continue in the class. Students reported that the learning of C language was more accessible due to the initial contact with Calango, mainly because they could write code in Portuguese, their native language. Overall results show that Calango was well-received by students, and it eased their early programming learning.