Understanding How and When Human Factors Are Used in the Software Process: A Text-Mining Based Literature Review

Abstract

Human Factors (HF) is the study of the interaction between users and technology with the aim of improving the user’s experience of a product and avoid unwanted issues in the usage of the system. HF is largely applied in several fields such as industrial processes, education, training, and design. In software development, HF plays a crucial role in the efficient and effective development of a software product and the success of the final product. This paper aims at indicating the state of the art of the literature on HF in software, in general and in the software development process in particular. To do so, a preliminary literature review using text mining has been performed. This work gathered papers using the terms “human factors” and “software” from four of the most used scientific digital databases (ACM DL, Scopus, Science Direct and IEEE Xplore). A total of 2192 papers were selected and automatically gathered into three clusters by using the X-means algorithm, which automatically recommended that number of clusters. The results show that there are three main areas where HF have been researched within software development: (1) the field of product evaluation (user experience) (2) the field of software development process, especially in the project management processes (3) the field of education. The results are an initial indication of the evolution of research in this area and where and how HF is applied in software engineering.