Supporting Ongoing User Involvement in Development via Expectation-Driven Event Monitoring

Involving end users in the development of interactive systems increases the likelihood those systems will be useful and usable. User involvement, however, is both time and resource intensive. Internetand World-Wide-Web-based software release models have magnified these problems. At the same time, these practices have begun to blur the distinction between development and use and, in so doing, have provided developers with unprecedented, and currently underutilized, opportunities for increasing user involvement. We propose an approach — based on expectation-driven event monitoring and expectation agents — that leverages these opportunities to support ongoing user involvement in the software development process.