Linking Software Development Phase and Product Attributes With User Evaluation: A Case Study on Games

This paper presents an evaluation methodology to reveal the relationships between the attributes of software products, practices applied during the development phase and the user evaluation of the products. For the case study, the games sector has been chosen due to easy access to the user evaluation of this type of software products. Product attributes and practices applied during the development phase have been collected from the developers via questionnaires. User evaluation results were collected from a group of independent evaluators. Two bipartite networks were created using the gathered data. The first network maps software products to the practices applied during the development phase and the second network maps the products to the product attributes. According to the links, similarities were determined and subgroups of products were obtained according to selected development phase practices. By this way, the effect of development phase on the user evaluation has been investigated