Collecting Usage Data for Software Development: Selection Framework for Technological Approaches

Software development methods are shifting towards faster deployments and closer to the end users. Their ever tighter engagement of end-users also requires new technologies for gathering feedback from those users. At the same time, widespread Internet connectivity of different application environments is enabling the collection of this post-deployment data also from sources other than traditional web and mobile software. However, the sheer number of different alternatives of collecting technologies makes the selection a complicated process in itself. In this paper, we describe the process of data-driven software development and study the challenges organizations face when they want to start guiding their development towards it. From these challenges, we extract evaluation criteria for technological approaches to usage data collecting. We list such approaches and evaluate them using the extracted criteria. Using a design science approach, we refine the evaluation criteria to a selection framework that can help practitioners in finding a suitable technological approach for automated collecting of usage data.