Topic outline

  • The theme of the seminar in software and service engineering for the spring semester 2022 is “User studies and requirements for developing smart digital services”. The seminar will be arranged in teaching periods IV and V with lectures on Wednesdays between 10-12.

    The lectures will be arranged using Zoom. The Zoom link is:


    Digital services are part of all businesses. A product or a service without the digital service extension at some part of the business value chain is hard to find. In order to successfully develop these digital parts of the service offering, proper foundation on understanding customers and users is essential. What are the things that customers want, and users really need? How do the “smart” digital services deliver real value for the users instead of just adding unwanted annoyances?

    There are multiple questions and viewpoints that can be used to address these challenges: What are appropriate methods and practices for studying the anticipated users and customers? How to describe and transform the findings into implementable requirements? How to coordinate user studies in agile and constantly ongoing digital service delivery? Furthermore, global businesses face the challenge of studying customers and users in distant or otherwise inaccessible locations (e.g., due to pandemic restrictions) – without having direct access to them. Application and context-specific characteristics can pose serious challenges and difficulties for successful performance and completion of the development work.

    The seminar enables students to choose a viewpoint of their interest e.g., according to their ongoing or anticipated thesis project. The thematic domain is rich and enables various types of approaches and foci within user-centred design, requirements engineering, and software engineering. The seminar includes the exploration of the topic, choosing appropriate viewpoint, searching and reading of the chosen literature, and writing a seminar report (essay) on the chosen topic. At the end of the seminar, the students are requested to present their findings and outcomes in joint seminar sessions.

    • File icon
      Lecture slides: Introduction lecture (#1) File
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    • Etherpad Lite icon
      Seminar papers Etherpad Lite
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      Record/announce the title and other (metadata-style) information of your seminar paper in this shared document.

    • File icon
      Lecure slides: Characteristics of Successful Papers File
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      Lecure slides on 23-March-2022: Characteristics of Successful Papers

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      What IMRAD? Why IMRAD? Page
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      Especially for empirically grounded papers, the IMRAD structure is a popular, widely used structure in scientific papers. You may consider using it in your seminar papers and theses, too.

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      How to write a literature review / review paper? Page
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