Context:

Human values such as inclusion, privacy, and accessibility need to be considered during software development to attract and maintain users. However, little effort has been made to study human values consideration in software development, particularly in software development artefacts.

Objective:

Issue discussion is potentially a rich source for human values analysis because it is a common place for users and developers to share and communicate their concerns. This paper aims to investigate the extent to which human values are discussed and whether the presence of values differs across projects.

Method:

We carried out a case study to discover human values in 1,097 issues collected from three Android projects: Signal, K-9, and Focus.

Results:

We identified 20 value themes and proposed a contextualised software engineering description for each of them. The analysis shows that privacy, freedom, usability, and efficiency were the prevalent value themes in the issue discussions of these three projects. Meanwhile, Self-direction - Action and Security - Personal are the common prevalent human values found in the projects. Moreover, we found that a statement of values from the apps and their functionalities could contribute to the presence of values.

Conclusion:

The results suggest that human values are present in software development artefacts, for which automated tools can be developed to extract and classify human values from them.

中文翻译：

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软件开发人工制品中的人文价值：三个 Android 应用程序中问题讨论的案例研究

语境：

在软件开发过程中需要考虑诸如包容性、隐私和可访问性等人文价值，以吸引和维护用户。然而，很少有人努力研究软件开发中的人文价值考虑，特别是在软件开发人工制品中。

客观的：

问题讨论可能是人类价值观分析的丰富来源，因为它是用户和开发人员分享和交流他们关注的共同场所。本文旨在调查讨论人类价值观的程度以及价值观的存在是否因项目而异。

方法：

我们开展了一项案例研究，从三个 Android 项目收集的 1,097 个问题中发现人类价值观：Signal、K-9 和 Focus。

结果：

我们确定了 20 个价值主题，并为每个主题提出了一个情境化的软件工程描述。分析表明，隐私、自由、可用性和效率是这三个项目讨论的普遍价值主题。同时，自我导向-行动和安全-个人是项目中普遍流行的人类价值观。此外，我们发现应用程序及其功能的价值声明可能有助于价值的存在。

结论：

结果表明，人类价值观存在于软件开发人工制品中，为此可以开发自动化工具来从中提取人类价值观并对其进行分类。