Understanding How Brazilian Software Organizations Collect and Utilize User Feedback: A Survey
Abstract
Context: User feedback is a critical resource for guiding software evolution and improving usability and user experience. However, in Brazil, there is still little evidence of how organizations collect, analyze, and utilize user feedback in practice. Objective: Our goal is to provide an overview of how Brazilian software organizations have captured and utilized user feedback. Method:We conducted a survey involving 31 Brazilian software organizations. Data was collected through a structured questionnaire, represented using graphs and tables, and analyzed. Results: The study results revealed that most organizations predominantly have captured explicit feedback, combining internal and external sources, but systematic analysis and longitudinal monitoring have been limited. User feedback has been used mainly to support maintenance, strategic decision-making, and innovation initiatives aiming at software evolution. Integrating supporting tools, low response rates, difficulties in interpreting subjective or generic feedback, and resistance from development teams to incorporate user feedback into decision-making were highlighted as challenges faced by the organizations. Conclusion: Although organizations have recognized the importance of user feedback, the study results suggest that user feedback management practices in Brazil are not very mature yet, indicating opportunities for improvement, such as using implicit feedback and monitoring changes in user feedback over time.
Keywords:
User feedback, Survey, Software Engineering, Brazilian Organizations
References
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Anastasiia Tkalich, Eriks Klotins, Tor Sporsem, Viktoria Stray, Nils Brede Moe, and Astri Barbala. 2025. User Feedback in Continuous Software Engineering: Revealing the State-of-Practice. Empirical Software Engineering 30, 79 (2025), 1–30. DOI: 10.1007/s10664-024-10557-2
Simon van Oordt and Emitza Guzman. 2021. On the Role of User Feedback in Software Evolution: A Practitioners’ Perspective. In 2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). IEEE, Notre Dame, IN, USA, 282–292. DOI: 10.1109/RE51729.2021.00027
Claes Wohlin, Per Runeson, Martin Höst, Magnus C Ohlsson, Björn Regnell, and AndersWesslén. 2012. Experimentation in Software Engineering. Springer Science & Business Media.
Liang Chen. 2019. Continuous software evolution enabled by user feedback: A systematic mapping study. Information and Software Technology 112 (2019), 1–16. DOI: 10.1016/j.infsof.2019.04.004
Brian Fitzgerald and Klaas-Jan Stol. 2017. Continuous software engineering: A roadmap and agenda. Journal of Systems and Software 123 (2017), 176–189. DOI: 10.1016/j.jss.2015.06.063
Moises Gallegos, Adaira Landry, Al’Ai Alvarez, Dayle Davenport, Martina Caldwell, Melissa Parsons, Michael Gottlieb, and Sreeja Natesan. 2022. Holistic Review, Mitigating Bias, and Other Strategies in Residency Recruitment for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: An Evidence-based Guide to Best Practices from the Council of Residency Directors in Emergency Medicine. Western Journal of Emergency Medicine 23 (05 2022), 345–352. DOI: 10.5811/westjem.2022.3.54419
Eduard C. Groen, Joerg Doerr, and Sebastian Adam. 2015. Towards Crowd-Based Requirements Engineering: A Research Preview. In Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2015) (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 9013). Springer, 247–253. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-16101-3_18
Helena Holmström Olsson and Jan Bosch. 2013. Post-deployment data collection in software-intensive embedded products. In International Working Conference on Business Process Modeling, Development and Support (BPMDS) (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, Vol. 167). Springer, 173–184. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-38484-4_13
Jan Ole Johanssen, Anja Kleebaum, Bernd Bruegge, and Barbara Paech. 2019. How do Practitioners Capture and Utilize User Feedback during Continuous Software Engineering?. In Proceedings of the 27th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). IEEE, 289–299. DOI: 10.1109/RE.2019.00026
Naci Karkin and Volkan Göçoğlu. 2025. An e-Participation Model Proposal for Incorporation of Citizen Feedback into Government Business. Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham, 109–128. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-92301-2_7
Ze Shi Li, Nowshin Nawar Arony, Kezia Devathasan, Manish Sihag, Neil Ernst, and Daniela Damian. 2024. Unveiling the life cycle of user feedback: Best practices from software practitioners. In Proceedings of the 46th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering. 1–13.
Soo Ling Lim, Daniela Damian, and Anthony Finkelstein. 2011. StakeSource2. 0: using social networks of stakeholders to identify and prioritise requirements. In Proceedings of the 33rd international conference on Software engineering. 1022–1024. DOI: 10.1145/1985793.1985983
Walid Maalej, Zijad Kurtanović, Hadeer Nabil, and Christoph Stanik. 2016. On the automatic classification of app reviews. Requirements Engineering 21 (2016), 311–331.
Walid Maalej and Daniela Pagano. 2013. Analyzing User Feedback in App Stores. In Proceedings of the 21st IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). IEEE, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 125–134. DOI: 10.1109/RE.2013.6636712
Mads Olsen Nekkøy. 2023. Exploring How Developers Work with Data to Understand User Needs: A Case Study. Master’s thesis. Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway. Supervisor: Torgeir Dingsøyr, Co-supervisor: Tor Sporsem.
Jakob Nielsen and Thomas K Landauer. 1993. A mathematical model of the finding of usability problems. In Proceedings of the INTERACT’93 and CHI’93 conference on Human factors in computing systems. 206–213. DOI: 10.1145/169059.169166
Freddy Paz and José Antonio Pow-Sang. 2016. A Systematic Mapping Review of Usability Evaluation Methods for Software Development Process. International Journal of Software Engineering and Its Applications 10, 1 (2016), 165–178. DOI: 10.14257/ijseia.2016.10.1.16
Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck. 2003. Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit. Addison-Wesley Professional, Boston.
Marie Van Poucke. 2025. Appraising Feedback Stance in Higher Education: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study of Student and Academic Perceptions, Perspectives and Preferences. Corpus Pragmatics (2025). DOI: 10.1007/s41701-025-00196-3 Published 03 June 2025.
Eric Ries. 2011. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc, New York, USA. 296 pages.
M.-A. Storey D. Damian S. Easterbrook, J. Singer. 2008. Selecting empirical methods for software engineering research - Guide to advanced empirical software engineering. Springer.
Remco Snijders, Fabiano Dalpiaz, Mahmood Hosseini, Alimohammad Shahri, and Raian Ali. 2014. Crowd-centric requirements engineering. In 2014 IEEE/ACM 7th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing. IEEE, 614–615. DOI: 10.1109/UCC.2014.96
Michael Stade, Manuel Oriol, Omar Cabrera, Farid Fotrousi, Rainer Schaniel, Norbert Seyff, and Oliver Schmidt. 2017. Providing a user forum is not enough: First experiences of a software company with CrowdRE. In 2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops (REW). IEEE, 164–169. DOI: 10.1109/REW.2017.66
Margaret-Anne Storey, Alexander Zagalsky, Fernando Figueira Filho, Leif Singer, and Daniel M. German. 2020. How developers use feedback in practice: a multimethod study. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 46, 9 (2020), 930–949. DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2018.2877754
Anastasiia Tkalich, Eriks Klotins, Tor Sporsem, Viktoria Stray, Nils Brede Moe, and Astri Barbala. 2025. User Feedback in Continuous Software Engineering: Revealing the State-of-Practice. Empirical Software Engineering 30, 79 (2025), 1–30. DOI: 10.1007/s10664-024-10557-2
Simon van Oordt and Emitza Guzman. 2021. On the Role of User Feedback in Software Evolution: A Practitioners’ Perspective. In 2021 IEEE 29th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE). IEEE, Notre Dame, IN, USA, 282–292. DOI: 10.1109/RE51729.2021.00027
Claes Wohlin, Per Runeson, Martin Höst, Magnus C Ohlsson, Björn Regnell, and AndersWesslén. 2012. Experimentation in Software Engineering. Springer Science & Business Media.
Published
2025-09-22
How to Cite
MAGALHÃES, Elionai de Souza; BARCELLOS, Monalessa P.; SOUZA, Vítor E. Silva.
Understanding How Brazilian Software Organizations Collect and Utilize User Feedback: A Survey. In: BRAZILIAN SYMPOSIUM ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING (SBES), 39. , 2025, Recife/PE.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2025
.
p. 360-370.
ISSN 2833-0633.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbes.2025.9954.
