Weighted Games for User Journeys

This is the repository of the conference paper "Weighted Games for User Journeys" [1] and the journal extension "User Journey Games: Automating User-Centric Analysis" [2] by Kobialka, Tapia Tarifa, Bergersen and Johnsen. A novel game approach for customer journeys is presented and accompanied by two case studies.

• The case study is implemented in "case_study.ipynb".It produces all images shown in the paper and contains an implementation of the presented unrolling algorithm.
• The file "pipeline.ipynb" demonstrates the presented pipeline with an example.
• The data of the industry case studies is contained in "data.csv" and "data_extended.csv".
• The file "requirements.txt" contains the used libraries in the notebooks.
• "unrollring_inpout.png" is unrolled to "unrolled.ps". "unrolled.ps" contains the original activity names as found in the data.
• "gopos.csv" and "goposfast.csv" contain the simulation data produced by UPPAAL.
• "activities.xml" serces as input file do denote which actions are user/company owned in the case study.
• *.q files contain queries used in the UPPAAL model checker, in our work we use UPPAAL-4.1.20 Stratego-10 on a Linux64 system.

Context

GrepS is a company that provides analysis and measurement of programming skills for the Java programming language. The service is research based [3]. Customers are organizations hiring or training software developers. The users of the service are developers who receive a request from a customer organization to complete a skill analysis within a specific time frame, typically 1-2 weeks.

The service consists of a sign-up phase followed by a phase where the user several programming tasks in an authentic programming environment, which includes an instructional task and a practice task. Finally, the service analyses the skills of the user and then requests the user to share the skill report with the customer.

The customer pays GrepS for each skill report it receives. In a successful use of the service, a user successfully completes three phases:

1. signing up,
2. solving all programming tasks
3. reviewing and share the skill report with the customer.

In an unsuccessful use of the service, the user permanently stops using the service or does not want to share the skill report with GrepS' customer.

Data Descprition

The data contained in data.csv and data_extended.csv contains one event per line. Per event are stored:

• Developer ID: Identifier for developers.
• Category: Whether the action was performed in a test hired by a company (B2B) or by a "freelance" developer (B2C)
• Company ID: ID of the company the developer is working for. For B2C developer is a dummy value entered.
• Timestamp: Time when the event occured.
• Type: Classifies types of events:
  • state: Event relates to internal changes in the system of GrepS
  • subject: Event relates to front-end activities
  • task: Event relates to the presented task
  • feedback: Event relates to the questionaire users fill out after tasks
• Message: Event name

Example

The file "case_study.ipynb" contains the preprocessing and analysis performed in the paper "Weighted Games for User Journeys". The verification was done with Stratego 9 for Linux64 with UPPAAL-4.1.20 used. The used software is stated in "requirements.txt".

References

[1] Kobialka, P., Tapia Tarifa, S. L., Bergersen, G. R., Johnsen, E. B.: Weighted Games for User Journeys. In: Proc. SEFM 2022, LNCS 13550, Springer (2022).

[2] Kobialka, P., Tapia Tarifa, S. L., Bergersen, G. R., Johnsen, E. B.: User Journey Games: Automating User-Centric Analysis. In: Software and Systems Modeling. Springer (2024), to appear.

[3] Bergersen, G.R., Sjoberg, D.I., Dyba, T.: Construction and Validation of an Instrument for Measuring Programming Skill. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 40(12), 1163--1184 (Dec 2014)