Modelling Realistic User Behaviour in Information Systems Simulations as Fuzzing Aspects

Abstract

In this paper we contend that the engineering of information systems is hampered by a paucity of tools to tractably model, simulate and predict the impact of realistic user behaviours on the emergent properties of the wider socio-technical system, evidenced by the plethora of case studies of system failure in the literature. We address this gap by presenting a novel approach that models ideal user behaviour as workflows, and introduces irregularities in that behaviour as aspects which fuzz the model. We demonstrate the success of this approach through a case study of software development workflows, showing that the introduction of realistic user behaviour to idealised workflows better simulates outcomes reported in the empirical software engineering literature.

Designing a mobile game to generate player data -- lessons learned

“…We are therefore interested in taking small datasets from systems of a manageable size, and producing supplementary synthetic data which appears plausibly realistic. We believe this data can be produced by an application of aspect-oriented programming (Wallis and Storer 2018a). A small, naive simulation of behaviour is modified via applied aspects to introduce errors and improvements.…”