arXiv subjects

Kezia Devathasan

Publications and source records attributed to Kezia Devathasan.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

REConnect: Participatory RE for Social Sustainability

Context: Software increasingly shapes daily life, making requirements engineering (RE) essential for ensuring systems contribute to community social sustainability. Yet automated elicitation practices risk distancing RE from the cultural, social, and political contexts that inform user needs, systematically excluding the communities most dependent on socially impactful software. AI-assisted RE has intensified this trend. Objective: This paper introduces REConnect, a human-centered participatory RE framework that recenters requirements work on human connection and relationality as the foundation for understanding lived experiences and ensuring alignment with community values and aspirations. Methods: REConnect was derived through qualitative analysis of 26 community-engaged software projects conducted through the INSPIRE program at the University of Victoria between 2022 and 2025, spanning rural Nepal, urban Canada, and remote Arctic Canada. We conducted a reflective synthesis across all 26 projects, followed by in-depth thematic analysis of three illustrative projects. Results: Three core principles are articulated: building trusting relationships, co-creating with and alongside stakeholders, and empowering users as agents of change. Each is operationalized through actionable REConnect Actions (REActions) embedding relationality and continuous stakeholder engagement throughout the project lifecycle. Conclusions: REConnect positions human connection as the foundation of RE for socio-technical systems aiming toward social sustainability. While AI can accelerate certain RE activities, its integration must be governed by participatory principles that preserve human agency and ensure marginalized voices are not excluded. We discuss how REConnect integrates with AI support while maintaining critical human agency in requirements engineering.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Beyond Diversity:Computing for Inclusive Software

This chapter presents, from our research on inclusive software within the context of a diversity and inclusion based STEM program at the University of Victoria, INSPIRE: STEM for Social Impact (hereafter Inspire). In a society with an ever increasing reliance on technology, we often neglect the fact that software development processes and practices unintentionally marginalize certain groups of end users. While the Inspire program and its first iteration in 2022 are described in detail in CHAPTER 26, here we describe our insights from an analysis of the development processes and practices used by the teams. We found that empathy-based requirements gathering techniques and certain influences on the software development teams' motivation levels impact the teams' ability to build inclusive software. This chapter begins with an explanation of the Inspire program and a discussion on what the term ``inclusive software'' actually means in our context before highlighting useful practices for designing inclusive software.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Software Engineering Through Community-Engaged Learning and an Inclusive Network

Retaining diverse, underrepresented students in computer science and software engineering programs is a significant concern for universities. In this chapter, we describe the INSPIRE: STEM for Social Impact program at the University of Victoria, Canada, which leverages the three principles of self-determination theory competence, relatedness, and autonomy in the design of strategies to empower women and other underrepresented groups in using software and other engineering solutions to approach sustainability, community-driven problems. We also describe lessons learned from a first successful year that involved over 30 students, 6 community partners (sustainability problem owners), and over 20 industry and academic mentors and reached out to more than 200 solution end users in our communities. Finally, we provide recommendations for universities and organizations who may want to adopt our approach. In the program 24 diverse students (in terms of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, academic standing, and background) divided into six teams paired with six community partners worked on solving society impactful problems and developed solutions for a number of respective community partners. Each team was supported by an experienced upper year student and mentors from industry and community throughout the program. The experiential learning approach of the program allowed the students to learn a variety of soft and technical skills while developing a solution that has a social and/or environmental impact. Having a diverse team and creating a solution for real end users motivated the students to actively collaborate with their peers, community partners, and mentors resulting in the development of an inclusive network. A network of like minded people is crucial in empowering underrepresented individuals and inspiring them to remain in the computer science and software engineering fields.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

Unveiling the Life Cycle of User Feedback: Best Practices from Software Practitioners

User feedback has grown in importance for organizations to improve software products. Prior studies focused primarily on feedback collection and reported a high-level overview of the processes, often overlooking how practitioners reason about, and act upon this feedback through a structured set of activities. In this work, we conducted an exploratory interview study with 40 practitioners from 32 organizations of various sizes and in several domains such as e-commerce, analytics, and gaming. Our findings indicate that organizations leverage many different user feedback sources. Social media emerged as a key category of feedback that is increasingly critical for many organizations. We found that organizations actively engage in a number of non-trivial activities to curate and act on user feedback, depending on its source. We synthesize these activities into a life cycle of managing user feedback. We also report on the best practices for managing user feedback that we distilled from responses of practitioners who felt that their organization effectively understood and addressed their users' feedback. We present actionable empirical results that organizations can leverage to increase their understanding of user perception and behavior for better products thus reducing user attrition.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

A Data-Driven Approach for Finding Requirements Relevant Feedback from TikTok and YouTube

The increasing importance of videos as a medium for engagement, communication, and content creation makes them critical for organizations to consider for user feedback. However, sifting through vast amounts of video content on social media platforms to extract requirements-relevant feedback is challenging. This study delves into the potential of TikTok and YouTube, two widely used social media platforms that focus on video content, in identifying relevant user feedback that may be further refined into requirements using subsequent requirement generation steps. We evaluated the prospect of videos as a source of user feedback by analyzing audio and visual text, and metadata (i.e., description/title) from 6276 videos of 20 popular products across various industries. We employed state-of-the-art deep learning transformer-based models, and classified 3097 videos consisting of requirements relevant information. We then clustered relevant videos and found multiple requirements relevant feedback themes for each of the 20 products. This feedback can later be refined into requirements artifacts. We found that product ratings (feature, design, performance), bug reports, and usage tutorial are persistent themes from the videos. Video-based social media such as TikTok and YouTube can provide valuable user insights, making them a powerful and novel resource for companies to improve customer-centric development.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

"Software is the easy part of Software Engineering" -- Lessons and Experiences from A Large-Scale, Multi-Team Capstone Course

Capstone courses in undergraduate software engineering are a critical final milestone for students. These courses allow students to create a software solution and demonstrate the knowledge they accumulated in their degrees. However, a typical capstone project team is small containing no more than 5 students and function independently from other teams. To better reflect real-world software development and meet industry demands, we introduce in this paper our novel capstone course. Each student was assigned to a large-scale, multi-team (i.e., company) of up to 20 students to collaboratively build software. Students placed in a company gained first-hand experiences with respect to multi-team coordination, integration, communication, agile, and teamwork to build a microservices based project. Furthermore, each company was required to implement plug-and-play so that their services would be compatible with another company, thereby sharing common APIs. Through developing the product in autonomous sub-teams, the students enhanced not only their technical abilities but also their soft skills such as communication and coordination. More importantly, experiencing the challenges that arose from the multi-team project trained students to realize the pitfalls and advantages of organizational culture. Among many lessons learned from this course experience, students learned the critical importance of building team trust. We provide detailed information about our course structure, lessons learned, and propose recommendations for other universities and programs. Our work concerns educators interested in launching similar capstone projects so that students in other institutions can reap the benefits of large-scale, multi-team development

cs.SE↗