Software product development companies are increasingly striving to become data-driven. The access to customer feedback and product data has been, with products increasingly becoming connected to the Internet, demonetized. Systematically collecting the feedback and efficiently using it in product development, however, are challenges that large-scale software development companies face today when being faced by large amounts of available data. In this thesis, we explore the collection, use and impact of customer feedback on software product development. We base our work on a 2-year longitudinal multiple-case study research with case companies in the software-intensive domain, and complement it with a systematic review of the literature. In our work, we identify and confirm that large-software companies today collect vast amounts of feedback data, however, struggle to effectively use it. And due to this situation, there is a risk of prioritizing the development of features that may not deliver value to customers. Our contribution to this problem is threefold. First, we present a comprehensive and systematic review of activities and techniques used to collect customer feedback and product data in software product development. Next, we show that the impact of customer feedback evolves over time, but due to the lack of sharing of the collected data, companies do not fully benefit from this feedback. Finally, we provide an improvement framework for practitioners and researchers to use the collected feedback data in order to differentiate between different feature types and to model feature value during the lifecycle. With our contributions, we aim to bring software companies one step closer to data-driven decision making in software product development.

The exponential rise in the generation of data has introduced many new areas of research including data science, data engineering, machine learning, artificial in- telligence to name a few. It has become important for any industry or organization to precisely understand and analyze the data in order to extract value out of the data. The value of the data can only be realized when it is put into practice in the real world and the most common approach to do this in the technology industry is through software engineering. This brings into picture the area of privacy oriented software engineering and thus there is a rise of data protection regulation acts such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), PDPA (Personal Data Protection Act), etc. Many organizations, governments and companies who have accumulated huge amounts of data over time may conveniently use the data for increasing business value but at the same time the privacy aspects associated with the sensitivity of data especially in terms of personal information of the people can easily be circumvented while designing a software engineering model for these types of applications. Even before the software engineering phase for any data processing application, often times there can be one or many data sharing agreements or privacy policies in place. Every organization may have their own way of maintaining data privacy practices for data driven development. There is a need to generalize or categorize their approaches into tactics which could be referred by other practitioners who are trying to integrate data privacy practices into their development. This qualitative study provides an understanding of various approaches and tactics that are being practised within the industry for privacy preserving data science in software engineering, and discusses a tool for data usage monitoring to identify unethical data access. Finally, we studied strategies for secure data publishing and conducted experiments using sample data to demonstrate how these techniques can be helpful for securing private data before publishing. / Graduate