Didar Zowghi

University of Technology Sydney | UTS · School of Software

The recent surge in the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT into qualitative research in software engineering, much like in other professional domains, demands a closer inspection. This vision paper seeks to explore the opportunities of using LLMs in qualitative research to address many of its legacy challenges as well as poten...

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) transforms the domain of diplomacy in the 21st century, this research addresses the pressing need to evaluate the dualistic nature of these advancements, unpacking both the challenges they pose and the opportunities they offer. It has been almost a year since the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI that revolutionised variou...

The growing presence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in various sectors necessitates systems that accurately reflect societal diversity. This study seeks to envision the operationalization of the ethical imperatives of diversity and inclusion (D&I) within AI ecosystems, addressing the current disconnect between ethical guidelines and their practica...

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) permeates many aspects of society, it brings numerous advantages while at the same time raising ethical concerns and potential risks, such as perpetuating inequalities through biased or discriminatory decision-making. To develop AI systems that cater for the needs of diverse users and uphold ethical values, it is ess...

The recent surge in the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT into qualitative research in software engineering, much like in other professional domains, demands a closer inspection. This vision paper seeks to explore the opportunities of using LLMs in qualitative research to address many of its legacy challenges as well as poten...

The pervasive presence and wide-ranging variety of artificial intelligence (AI) systems underscore the necessity for inclusivity and diversity in their design and implementation, to effectively address critical issues of fairness, trust, bias, and transparency. However, diversity and inclusion (D&I) considerations are significantly neglected in AI...

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) has catalyzed a multifaceted discourse in the software engineering (SE) community. The crux of this dialogue is to pinpoint the distinct attributes of AI systems that necessitate tailored SE methodologies. While classical SE techniques have proved effective across a spectrum of systems, there’s an...

Responsible AI is widely considered as one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time and is key to increase the adoption of AI. Recently, a number of AI ethics principles frameworks have been published. However, without further guidance on best practices, practitioners are left with nothing much beyond truisms. Also, significant efforts hav...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to improve the understanding of the factors influencing the success of digital transformation (DT) and problems/challenges in DT as well as the communication methods used to involve citizens, based on a systematic literature review of research articles about citizen involvement in DT published between January 20...

Artificial Intelligence (AI)'s pervasive presence and variety necessitate diversity and inclusivity (D&I) principles in its design for fairness, trust, and transparency. Yet, these considerations are often overlooked, leading to issues of bias, discrimination, and perceived untrustworthiness. In response, we conducted a Systematic Review to unearth...

Adult learning is a complex phenomenon that takes place over an adult’s lifetime and is not limited to a particular age. It includes a set of activities to enhance life through improving skills, knowledge and capabilities. The foundational theories of adult learning, such as andragogy theory, place the individual adult centre stage and differentiat...

This paper aims at developing a taxonomy of factors influencing data quality. For this to happen, firstly, we conducted a survey of literature that has focused on examining the factors affecting data quality for the purpose of quality management and improvement in conceptual models. Secondly, referring to a well-established taxonomy development met...

The advent of AI driven large language models (LLMs) have stirred discussions about their role in qualitative research. Some view these as tools to enrich human understanding, while others perceive them as threats to the core values of the discipline. This study aimed to compare and contrast the comprehension capabilities of humans and LLMs. We con...

To date, there has been little concrete practical advice about how to ensure that diversity and inclusion considerations should be embedded within both specific Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and the larger global AI ecosystem. In this chapter, we present a clear definition of diversity and inclusion in AI, one which positions this concept wi...

Artificial Intelligence has found applications in a wide range of fields, including conversational agents designed for healthcare services. The quality of healthcare services greatly depends on the quality of the information provided by the agents. Achieving quality-assured information from conversational agents to support effective decision-making...

Narrative visualization is characterized by the integration of data visualization and storytelling techniques. These characteristics provide challenges in its evaluation. Little is known about how these evaluation challenges are addressed by narrative visualization practitioners. We surveyed experienced narrative visualization practitioners to inve...

Responsible AI has been widely considered as one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time and the key to unlock the AI market and increase the adoption. To address the responsible AI challenge, a number of AI ethics principles frameworks have been published recently, which AI systems are supposed to conform to. However, without further bes...

Context The reengineering process of large data-intensive legacy software applications (“legacy applications” for brevity) to cloud platforms involves different interrelated activities. These activities are related to planning, architecture design, re-hosting/lift-shift, code refactoring, and other related ones. In this regard, the cloud computing...

Many applications need to meet diverse requirements of a large-scale distributed user group. That challenges the current requirements engineering techniques. Crowd-based requirements engineering was proposed as an umbrella term for dealing with the requirements development in the context of the large-scale user group. However, there are still many...

The reengineering process of large data-intensive legacy software applications to cloud platforms involves different interrelated activities. These activities are related to planning, architecture design, re-hosting/lift-shift, code refactoring, and other related ones. In this regard, the cloud computing literature has seen the emergence of differe...

Adult learning is a lifelong process whereby knowledge is formed through the transformation of adults' experience. Research on online adult learning has been on the rise in recent years, thanks to the innovative opportunities provided to adults by digital technologies. Online communities of practice (OCOPs) a one of such opportunities, which offer...

Context: User involvement is generally considered to contributing to user satisfaction and project success and is central to Agile software development. In theory, the expectations about user involvement, such as the PO's, are quite demanding in this Agile way of working. But what are the expectations seen in practice, and are the expectations of u...

The science education community is increasingly valuing the use of mobile apps in inquiry-based learning (IBL) to improve learner’ attitudes and their understanding of science concepts. Although there exists a body of research on mobile apps used for IBL in science education, limited attention has been paid to linking apps’ features with their peda...

Software has always been considered as malleable. Changes to software requirements are inevitable during the development process. Despite many software engineering advances over several decades, requirements changes are a source of project risk, particularly when businesses and technologies are evolving rapidly. Although effectively managing requir...

With the vast number of apps and the complexity of their features, it is becoming challenging for teachers to select a suitable learning app for their courses. Several evaluation frameworks have been proposed in the literature to assist teachers with this selection. The iPAC framework is a well-established mobile learning framework highlighting the...

The year 2020 brought us the global pandemic of COVID-19, which is not just a health crisis but a disruption to the fabric of society around the world. With no vaccine yet approved, other measures have been taken all over the world related to lockdowns, social distancing, and contact tracing to quarantine the infected individuals and suppress commu...

Among the variety of the available requirements elicitation techniques, interviews are the most commonly used. Performing effective interviews is challenging, especially for students and novice analysts, since interviews’ success depends largely on soft skills and experience. Despite their diffusion and their challenging nature, when it comes to re...

Lay Description What is already known about this topic? Inquiry‐based learning (IBL) in science education is a pedagogical approach in which students' learning is driven by an investigative question. The use of mobile technologies can create customized learning opportunities for science students. Mobile technology‐supported IBL (mIBL) can enable s...

The core aim of requirements inspection is to ensure the high quality of already elicited requirements in the Software Requirements Specification. Teaching requirements inspection to novices is challenging, as inspecting requirements needs several skills as well as knowledge of the product and process that is hard to achieve in a classroom environm...

Background: As a dimension of data quality in electronic health records (EHR), data completeness plays an important role in improving quality of care. Although many studies of data management focus on constructing the factors that influence data quality for the purpose of quality improvement, the constructs that are developed for interpreting facto...

Background: As a dimension of data quality in electronic health records (EHR), data completeness plays an important role in improving quality of care. Although many studies of data management focus on constructing the factors that influence data quality for the purpose of quality improvement, the constructs that are developed for interpreting facto...

While several IoT architectures have been proposed for enabling smart city visions, not much work has been done to assess and compare these architectures. By applying our proposed evaluation framework that incorporates a variety of 33 criteria, this paper presents a comparative analysis of nine existing well-known IoT architectures. The results of...

Internet of Things platforms are key enablers for smart city initiatives, targeting the improvement of citizens quality of life and economic growth. As IoT platforms are dynamic, proactive, and heterogeneous socio-technical artefacts, systematic approaches are required for their development. Limited surveys have exclusively explored how IoT platfor...

Abstract. [Context & Motivation] Agile Requirements Engineering (ARE) is a collaborative, team-based process based on frequent elicitation, elaboration, estimation and prioritization of the user requirements, typically represented as user stories. While it is claimed that this Agile approach and the associated RE activities are effective, there is...

[Context & Motivation] Agile Requirements Engineering (ARE) is a collaborative, team-based process based on frequent elicitation, elaboration, estimation and prioritization of the user requirements, typically represented as user stories. While it is claimed that this Agile approach and the associated RE activities are effective, there is sparse emp...

The Internet of Things (IoT) is driving technological change and the development of new products and services that rely heavily on the quality of the data collected by IoT devices. There is a large body of research on data quality management and improvement in IoT, however, to date a systematic review of data quality measurement in IoT is not avail...

There is a body of research that highlights the role of data management to improve the quality of data, which in return improves organizational performance. The literature in data management has indicated the five theoretical constructs used to understand the factors influencing data quality, including top management support, capability on the regu...

Data completeness is an important dimension of data quality in electronic medical records (EMR). There are many constructs that influence data completeness in EMR. In this paper, we investigate three of these constructs: Clinical staff participation, EMR integration, and EMR alignment to care processes. We use these constructs from related studies...

A long stream of research in RE has been devoted to analyzing the occurrences and consequences of ambiguity in requirements documents. Ambiguity often occurs in documents, most often in natural language (NL) ones, but occasionally also in formal specifications, be it because of abstraction, or of imprecise designation of which real-world entities a...

The recent explosion of interest around Blockchain and capabilities of this technology to track all types of transaction more transparently and securely motivate us to explore the possibilities Blockchain offers across the supply chain. This paper examines whether Blockchain makes a good fit for use in an Australian manufacturer supply chain. To ad...

Interviews are the most widely used elicitation technique in requirements engineering (RE). However, conducting a requirements elicitation interview is challenging. The mistakes made in design or conduct of the interviews can create problems in the later stages of requirements analysis. Empirical evidence about effective pedagogical approaches for...

IoT (Internet of Things) platforms are key enablers for smart city initiatives, targeting the improvement of citizens’ quality of life and economic growth. As IoT platforms are dynamic, proactive, and heterogeneous socio-technical artefacts, systematic approaches are required for their development. Limited surveys have exclusively explored how IoT...

In this paper, we discuss gender disparity in software engineering (SE) conferences. We have examined the roles of General Chair, Program Chair, and main track Program Committee members in six highly ranked conferences in SE for a period of ten years in order to understand the pattern of gender disparity in visible roles. We also present the opinio...

Software engineering (SE) students not only need sufficient technical knowledge and problem solving ability but also social and interpersonal skills in order to be industry ready. To prepare the students for the ‘real world’ the SE educators frequently use ‘Authentic Assessment’ and ‘Project Based Learning (PBL)’ approaches in their curricula. Howe...

As researchers and teachers and practitioners, we “software types” excel at multitasking. This, in part, led us to ask the question: Can one attend a software engineering conference and do something good for society? We found the answer to be a resounding yes. In this article, we present our first experience of running RE Cares, a conference colloc...

Merely involving the users in software development won’t guarantee system success. User involvement is a complex, multifaceted phenomenon with a good side, a bad side, and an ugly side. A better, deeper understanding of those sides can help project managers develop responsive strategies for increasing user involvement’s effectiveness.

In order to improve and increase their utility, software products must evolve continually and incrementally to meet the new requirements of current and future users. Online reviews from users of the software provide a rich and readily available resource for discovering candidate new features for future software releases. However, it is challenging...

while several IoT architectures have been proposed for enabling smart city visions, not much work has been done to assess and compare these architectures. By applying our proposed evaluation framework that incorporates a variety of 33 criteria, this paper presents a comparative analysis of nine existing well-known IoT architectures. The results of...

[Context] Interviews are the most widely used elicitation technique in requirements engineering. However, conducting effective requirements elicitation interviews is challenging, due to the combination of technical and soft skills that requirements analysts often acquire after a long period of professional practice. Empirical evidence about trainin...

This paper aims at reviewing the existing theoretical support to enhance data quality and utilizing the findings of the review in the context of electronic medical records (EMRs). For this to happen, we first conducted a survey of publications that have a focus on an empirical investigation of factors influencing data quality in the conceptual mode...

Requirements elicitation requires extensive knowledge and deep understanding of the problem domain where the final system will be situated. However, in many software development projects, analysts are required to elicit the requirements from an unfamiliar domain, which often causes communication barriers between analysts and stakeholders. In this p...

Requirements elicitation can be very challenging in projects that require deep domain knowledge about the system at hand. As analysts have the full control over the elicitation process, their lack of knowledge about the system under study inhibits them from asking related questions and reduces the accuracy of requirements provided by stakeholders....

[CONTEXT] Involving users in software development is a complex and multi-faceted concept. Empirical research that studies power and politics of user involvement in software development is scarce. [OBJECTIVE] In this paper, we present the results from a case study of a software development project, where organizational politics was explored in conte...

In the constantly evolving world of software development, switching back and forth between tasks has become the norm. While task switching often allows developers to perform tasks effectively and may increase creativity via the flexible pathway, there are also consequences to frequent task-switching. For high-momentum tasks like software developmen...

In the constantly evolving world of software development, switching back and forth between tasks has become the norm. While task switching often allows developers to perform tasks effectively and may increase creativity via the flexible pathway, there are also consequences to frequent task-switching. For high-momentum tasks like software developmen...

[Context and Motivation] Ambiguities identified during requirements elicitation interviews can be used by the requirements analyst as triggers for additional questions and, consequently, for disclosing further – possibly tacit – knowledge. Therefore, every unidentified ambiguity may be a missed opportunity to collect additional information. [Questi...

The ubiquity, flexibility, ease of access and diverse capabilities of mobile technologies make them valuable and a necessity in current times. However, they are under-utilized assets in mathematics and science school education. This article analyses the high quality empirical evidence on mobile learning in secondary school science and mathematics e...

Crowdsourcing is a complex and sociotechnical problem solving approach for collaboration of geographically distributed volunteer crowd to contribute to the achievement of a common task. One of the major issues faced by crowdsourced projects is the trustworthiness of the crowd. This paper presents a vision to develop a framework with supporting meth...

This paper aims at proposing a conceptual model of achieving data completeness in electronic medical records (EMR). For this to happen, firstly, we draw on the model of factors influencing data quality management to construct our conceptual model. Secondly, we develop hypotheses of relationships between influencing factors for data completeness and...

[Context and Motivation] Ambiguities identified during requirements elicitation interviews can be used by the requirements analyst as triggers for additional questions and, consequently, for disclosing further – possibly tacit - knowledge. Therefore, every unidentified ambiguity may be a missed opportunity to collect additional information. [Questi...

Context: Security, in digitally connected organizational environments of today, involves many different perspectives, including social, physical, and technical factors. In order to understand the interactions among these correlated aspects and elicit potential threats geared towards a given organization, different security requirements analysis app...

Context: For over four decades user involvement has been considered intuitively to lead to user satisfaction, which plays a pivotal role in successful outcome of a software project. Objective: The objective of this paper is to explore the notion of user satisfaction within the context of the user involvement and system success relationship. Method...

Context: User involvement is generally considered to contributing to user satisfaction and project success and is central to Agile software development. In theory, the expectations about user involvement, such as the PO's, are quite demanding in this Agile way of working. But what are the expectations seen in practice, and are the expectations of u...

Context: User involvement is generally considered as good practice in software development, contributing to user satisfaction and project success. Regular and frequent user involvement (UI) is central to Agile software development but expectations of different stakeholders about user involvement are not always aligned. This misalignment could contr...

The launch of millions of apps has made it challenging for teachers to select the most suitable m-learning app for their teaching purposes. Several evaluation frameworks have been proposed in the research literature to assist teachers in selecting the right apps for their needs. This paper presents an innovative technique for evaluating educational...

As the adoption of eHealth has made it easier to access and aggregate healthcare data, there has been growing application for clinical decisions, health services planning, and public health monitoring with daily collected data in clinical care. Reliable data quality is a precursor of the aforementioned tasks. There is a body of research on data qua...

Conway's law asserts that communication structures of organizations constrain the design of the products they develop. This law is more explicitly observable in geographically distributed contexts because distributed teams are required to share information across different time zones and barriers. The diverse business processes and functions adopte...

The large number of third party services creates a paradox of choice and make service selection challenging for business analysts. The enormous on-line reviews and feedback by the past users provide a great opportunity to gauge their sentiments towards a particular product or service. The benefits of sentiment analysis have not been fully utilized...

With the huge number of services that are available online, requirements analysts face an overload of choice when they have to select the most suitable service that satisfies a set of customer requirements. Both service descriptions and requirements are often expressed in natural language (NL), and natural language processing (NLP) tools that can m...

Context: The benefits of involving users in software development projects have been studied extensively in the last four decades and have been reported to contribute to user satisfaction thus leading to system success. However, the relationship between user involvement and system success, being a multi-faceted and complex concept, has introduced ma...

This book is the first general social analysis that seriously considers the daily experience of information disruption and software failure within contemporary Western society. Through an investigation of informationalism, defined as a contemporary form of capitalism, it describes the social processes producing informational disorder. While most so...

There has been an increasing interest in conducting Systematic Literature Reviews (SLR) among Requirements Engineering (RE) researchers in recent years. However, so far there have been no tertiary studies conducted to provide a comprehensive overview of these published SLR in RE. In this paper we present a tertiary study of SLR that focus solely on...

Service Oriented software development saves time by reusing existing services and integrates them to create a new system. But selecting a service that satisfies the requirements of all concerned stakeholders is a challenging task. The situation has been exacerbated within the past few years with huge number of services available that offer similar...

The focus of Service Oriented Software Development (SOSD) is to develop software by integrating reusable services to lower the required cost, time and effort of development and increase reusability, agility, quality and customer satisfaction. It has been recognised in the literature that SOSD faces various challenges especially in requirements engi...

Traceability among requirements artifacts (and beyond, in certain cases all the way to actual implementation) has long been identified as a critical challenge in industrial practice. Manually establishing and maintaining such traces is a highskill, labour-intensive job. It is often the case that the ideal person for the job also has other, highly c...

Though the primary goal of requirements engineering research is to propose, develop, and validate effective solutions for important practical problems, practice has shown that successful projects take from 20-25 years to reach full industry adoption, while many projects fade and never advance beyond the initial research phase. In this interactive p...

Context For more than four decades it has been intuitively accepted that user involvement (UI) during system development lifecycle leads to system success. However when the researchers have evaluated the user involvement and system success (UI-SS) relationship empirically, the results were not always positive. Objective Our objective was to explor...

Experience shows that many software systems suffer from inherent conflict among Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs). It also confirms that resolution strategies for handling NFRs conflicts often result in changing overall design guidelines, not by simply changing one module. Therefore, in software system development, software developers need to anal...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the first Asia Pacific Requirements Engineering Symposium, APRES 2014, held in Auckland, New Zealand, in April 2014. The 16 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions. The focus of the papers is on the following topics: novel ideas, methods, tools, and techniques for improving...

Prior studies reveal that conflicts among Non Functional Requirements (NFRs) are not always absolute. They can also be relative depending on the context of the system being developed. Given that existing techniques to manage the NFRs conflicts are mainly focused on cataloguing the interrelationships among various types of NFRs, hence a technique to...