The software landscape has evolved to span mass-market systems targeting distributed and heterogeneous end users. However, designing such products faces several challenges due to the market dynamics and unknown requirements of heterogeneous and distributed end users. With the increased number of offerings and global competition, software providers need to be more responsive to customers. They have to offer products and services that do not only deliver functionality, but also perform on non-functional properties, such as high-availability, reliability or security, and find viable business models.
Product managers, as the new gatekeepers, decide on product features and plan which features go into development in the next release. Their role has a strategic and tactical impact on all the aspects related to product analysis, development, marketing, and sales which positions him as mini-CEO of the product. We seek to support product managers in the design of mass-market software systems through leveraging market research techniques, which can be applied remotely with distributed participants. We argue for using conjoint analysis (CA) in order to add user preference measurements to the traditional set of techniques for requirements engineering.
This workshop targets product managers and product owners of mass-market software products in IT provider companies to analyze the challenges in user-oriented design and to provide recommendations on how to involve the users through market research techniques, specifically conjoint analysis, for requirements management.
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Dana Naous is a Ph.D. candidate in Information Systems at the Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC) in University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Her research focuses on supporting user-oriented design of mass-market software products leveraging market research techniques. Before starting her PhD, she obtained a Master of Science degree in Management of Technology and Entrepreneurship from Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and a Bachelor degree of Engineering in Computer and Communications from the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.