Software evaluation via users' feedback at runtime

Users' evaluation of software at runtime is a powerful tool which enables us to capture and communicate a richer and updated knowledge on how users view software throughout its life cycle. Users understand the software as a means to meet their requirements and, thus, giving them a voice in the continuous runtime evaluation of software would naturally need to fit this level of abstraction. That is, users' evaluation feedback would mainly communicate their judgment on the role of the system in meeting their requirements. Users' runtime evaluation feedback could be used to take autonomous or semi-autonomous runtime adaptation decisions or to support developers on taking evolution and maintenance decisions. Within this picture, our research focuses on to the development of a modeling and elicitation framework of users' evaluation feedback at runtime. This includes devising mechanisms to structure such an evaluation feedback in a way that makes it easy for users to express and developers to interpret. We motivate our work and articulate the problem and the set of research questions to address in our research and the method to follow and reach them. We also discuss our initial results on the topic.