Wei Wang

Research Fellow

“We feel and know that we are eternal”

Baruch Spinoza

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End-Users vs Software Practitioners: Recruitment Challenges and Strategies in Software Engineering Research

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Abstract

This paper is about recruitment problems in software engineering research.

The paper compares two groups: people who use software and software practitioners who build software.

Each group can be hard to recruit for different reasons. For example, users may need trust and accessibility support, while practitioners may have limited time.

The paper shares lessons and strategies to help researchers recruit people more responsibly and effectively.

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🔍 Abstract

This paper shares insights from our first-hand experience with key recruitment challenges encountered in software engineering research, focusing on two distinct participant groups: end-users and software practitioners. By conducting a reflective analysis, we emphasise the particular challenges we faced when engaging these groups during empirical study recruitment phases. Significant challenges we faced in recruiting end-users include ensuring authenticity, maintaining engagement, achieving demographic diversity, and addressing privacy concerns. Conversely, we faced different challenges when recruiting software practitioners, including sourcing the right expertise, utilising online recruiting platforms, navigating time constraints, aligning incentives, obtaining a representative sample, and coordinating with remote and distributed teams. By detailing the strategies we employed to address these challenges, this paper contributes practical knowledge to enhance the efficacy and inclusiveness of research practices, ultimately fostering more robust software engineering research outcomes.

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📝 Citation

Wei Wang, Dulaji Hidellaarachchi, John Grundy, Hourieh Khalajzadeh, Humphrey O. Obie, and Anuradha Madugalla. "End-Users vs Software Practitioners: Recruitment Challenges and Strategies in Software Engineering Research." In 2024 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), pp. 400-411. IEEE, 2024. UPV