Collecting Product Usage Data Using a Transparent Logging Component

Paper i proceeding, 2015

Continuous software engineering and experiments on released products have become very popular in modern software development. In this paper, we present a software component used to transparently log usage data from products in order to facilitate the use of customer-usage data by software developers. Such a component can aid with software maintenance and lifecycle management, but also provide help in software production and validation. We present a technical solution, the evaluation of its influence on the performance of a sample product, and an initial study on the acceptance of such a technology by regular users. Our results show that the mechanisms available in modern programming languages make it possible to integrate such a component without manual interventions in product code and that users are generally positive towards using this technology for logging the usage of work-related applications. We conclude that this type of technology can provide new possibilities for developers to adjust product planning based on the customer usage data.