The integration of questionnaires into virtual reality experiences has recently been proposed as a way to reduce the potential biases introduced through the negative effects of leaving VR, however there has been little attention paid to how qualitative interviews could similarly be integrated into the virtual world for the purposes of user evaluation. In this paper we explore how conducting interviews within the virtual environment may affect the outcome of the evaluation and the relationship between participant and interviewer, and how this may differ with and without visual representation of the interviewer through use of an avatar. We conclude that in-VR interviews are a valid and promising method of data collection for user evaluation with similar data quality to in-person interviews, but that the interviewer should have a visual presence in the environment to maintain their relationship with the participant and the perceived realism of the environment.

This research to practice paper presents a reflective study showing the observations of the teaching teams and the practices during industrial projects for the Master of Software Development (MSwDev) program at Victoria University of Wellington (VUW), New Zealand. It is a conversion master program that helps the students to acquire specific skills to be ready for the transition to the software development industry, including the ability to work in an Agile team. Software development projects supported by industrial partners are an excellent means to evaluate the technical capacity of the students and the required skills. This reflective paper describes the evolution of an industry-sourced problem-based agile student project, which over three successive years, has included students from three different cohorts (User Experience (UX), Business Analysts (BA), and Software Developers (SwDev)). This year, a collaboration between different cohorts was not possible. Thus only software development students formed the agile teams.This paper describes and reflects on the teaching staff’s useful and problematic observations over the last twelve months using only the SwDev cohort and correlates that to the previous reflections when three different cohorts formed an Agile team. Those reflections are described, and several recommendations are drawn from the experiences. The authors also discuss the lessons learnt and the effect of COVID-19 on the teams’ performance.

This Research to Practice Full Paper presents a reflective study showing the online teaching and advisory practices during Covid-19. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, distance learning and active practices to engage online learners are now centre focused on educational institutions' everyday praxis. Tertiary educators have often struggled during enforced lockdowns to convert courses from face-to-face delivery to pure online delivery. This change has presented challenges in curriculum development as academics strive to achieve best practice. It is also challenging to design a pedagogically sound and engaging course for diverse students from a broad spectrum of educational backgrounds. Online classes often require unique infrastructures such as devices with specific tools or hardware requirements. This paper presents a reflective study showing the online teaching and advisory practices during Covid-19 by the first author while teaching and supervising Master of Science (MSc) dissertation students online at a top-ranked UK university (i.e. University of Liverpool). The first author has been involved in the programme for more than ten years. This university is called University A (Uni A) throughout this paper. The paper demonstrates Uni A students' journey from finding the dissertation advisor to completing the research project. It also discusses the class structure, the university policy and guidelines, teaching practices, and how student progress is managed and assessed. The paper then contrasts the first authors experience at Uni A with that of all authors (including the first author - who has been working at both universities) experience supervising postgraduate and honours students at a top New Zealand University (i.e. Victoria University of Wellington). This university is called University B (Uni B) throughout this paper. The lessons learnt from teaching a stream of students enrolled in a pure distance learning degree (i.e. deliberate online degree) at Uni A offers insight into how Uni B might better restructure its predominantly face-to-face degrees to support both online and in-person best practices.

Keeping track of the progress on software projects can be difficult and time consuming. Progress tracking requires developers to track progress by hand or digitally neither of which have good support for collaborative team processes. In this paper we present DashVis a tool to help support teams to track progress more effectively using large touch displays and visualization techniques. We conducted a study and found the visualizations to be very effective in supporting teams to gain a more accurate way of keeping track of progress. With large touch displays becoming ubiquitous in the work place and the demand for software teams to understand their progress more effectively there is a need for tools like DashVis.

Open Source Software (OSS) mailing lists have become popular targets for mining sentiment and emotions, as they provide a centralized communication hub between the distributed OSS community. Sentiment and emotions within communities can provide insights into how a community responds to certain events, who are the key members and how their behaviours impact the rest of the community. Such insights can inform initiatives aimed at fostering positive interactions between OSS community members, strengthening social ties, and helping the community accomplish its tasks. This poster presents our initial results from sentiment analysis of an OSS mailing list, and answers two key questions: (1) Given that the mailing list is used for peer-review of code, is the community sentiment negative overall? (2) Is community sentiment related to the month of the release cycle?

The emergence of various forms of digital money and innovative digital financial services allows stores of value to be created, held, moved, measured, and exchanged in novel ways. Yet the success of these new forms of transactional media is largely dependent on the ways that they are understood as useful and credible as viable forms of exchange, and on how they support the ways that their users interact around them. This article therefore examines interactional work around the use of money in making financial transactions: we call this moneywork . We report on an empirical study of the patterns of behavior of users of a mixed media (digital and analog) currency that supports mobile device payments—the Bristol Pound—exploring the impacts of its users’ understanding of the systems that underlie these transactions, the technical constraints on their potential for action, their practices of use, and the social interactions that these activities lie within. We draw design implications to support these payment practices.

There is a rapidly growing momentum driving the development of mobile payment systems for co-present interactions, using near-field communication on smartphones and contactless payment systems. The design (and marketing) imperative for this is to enable faster, simpler, effortless and secure transactions, yet our evidence shows that this focus on reducing transactional friction may ignore other important features around making payments. We draw from empirical data to consider user interactions around financial exchanges made on mobile phones. Our findings examine how the practices around making payments support people in making connections, to other people, to their communities, to the places they move through, to their environment, and to what they consume. While these social and community bonds shape the kinds of interactions that become possible, they also shape how users feel about, and act on, the values that they hold with their co-users. We draw implications for future payment systems that make use of community connections, build trust, leverage transactional latency, and generate opportunities for rich social interactions.

Modern software development often involves the use of complex, reusable components called Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Developers use APIs to complete tasks they could not otherwise accomplish in a reasonable time. These components are now vital to mainstream software development. But as APIs have become more important, understanding how to make them more usable is becoming a significant research question. To assess the current state of research in the field, we conducted a systematic mapping. A total of 28 papers were reviewed and categorized based on their research type and on the evaluation method employed by its authors. We extended the analysis of a subset of the papers we reviewed beyond the usual limits of a systematic map in order to more closely examine details of their evaluations - such as their structure and validity - and to summarize their recommendations. Based on these results, common problems in the field are discussed and future research directions are suggested.

Abstract Previous discussions of how User Experience (UX) designers and Agile developers can work together have focused on bringing the disciplines together by merging their processes or adopting specific techniques. This paper reports in detail on one observational study of a mature Scrum team in a large organization, and their interactions with the UX designers working on the same project. The evidence from our study shows that Agile development and UX design practice is not explained by rationalized accounts dealing with processes or techniques. Instead, understanding practice requires examining the wider organizational setting in which the Agile developers and UX designers are embedded. Our account focuses on the situatedness of the work by making reference to values and assumptions in the organizational setting, and the consequences that those values and assumptions had for practice. In this organizational setting, cooperation between the Agile developers and UX designers was achieved through ongoing articulation work by the developers, who were compelled to engage a culturally distinct UX design division. Based on this study, insights into culture, self‐organization and purposeful work highlight significant implications for practice. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.