Value Assessment by Potential Tool Adopters: Towards a Model that Considers Costs, Benefits and Risks of Adoption

摘要

When a user starts to think about whether she or he ought to adopt a new software engineering tool, she or he will think about costs, benefits and risks. The thinking may not be deep and rigorous, but it is clear from prior research that a certain amount of such thinking takes place. In this paper we present a model that categorizes the costs, benefits and risks and shows how they relate in a simple inequality. This can be used to guide tool developers towards creating more adoptable tools, and might be an improvement on current approaches that tend to address only a limited number of issues at a time. We show how this model can be applied towards adoption scenarios such as adoption of a commercial tool and adoption of Eclipse.