A Reliable Study of Software Reputation Based on User Experience (2010)

Many users have such experience that after downloading or buying a software product, it does not work well as you anticipated. However, it is lucky to some extent because many other users download malicious software applications from Internet directly. Those problems cause people to think carefully and seriously about reputation of software. As it is said, the software reputation is very important for users to buy or use software applications, especially for those people who have very few knowledge of computer technologies. Many researches provided various kinds of technical methods to verify whether a software product has good reputation or not. This paper mainly focuses on software reputation research based on user experience. Nowadays, one effective way to evaluate experience of users is Web Survey, which has increased in popularity because of its convenience, ease of use, low cost, and quickness in knowing the result of a survey. Web survey is widely used to gather user opinions on various purposes. However, most such systems are too weak to keep reliability, and sometimes with a complete fallacious result. After introducing a number of methodologies, we present a concept design of more reliable web survey system based on user experience of software products that are under estimation. Development tools and some web technologies are discussed, such as PHP and JavaScript that will be used in implementing the web survey system based on concept design of this paper in the future. PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a simple and practical dynamic web page development language, and it is widely used as a multipurpose scripting language embedded in HTML (Hypertext Marked Language). JavaScript is a scripting language and is primarily used in the client-side for development of dynamic websites. Therefore, these two technologies are proper to be applied. In order to solve the defined research problems, only proposing a method of web survey is not sufficient. The more significant point is reliability of that designed system. Therefore, Digital Signature technology is introduced and described, which will be used for user verification in the system for strengthening reliability of the web survey. The digital signature is widely used in electronic commerce, and it can authenticate one user’s identity effectively. Another important technology that can increase the reliability of comments from users is Reading Registry. As the “Windows” system is the most popular operation system on personal computers today, we choose to study it in this paper. The registry is a basic database of windows system that records every software applications’ information there. So by reading the information in registry, it is easily known whether a user’s comment is valid or not. If the registry records the under estimation software, it means that user indeed used the software and his/her comments are worth consideration, otherwise the comments are too untruthful to be accepted. Although the web survey system is presented and illustrated by using concept design of this paper, a series of scenarios have been designed to test the real processes of the system. Three main series of scenarios were designed corresponding to digital signature method, registry check method and reputation calculation process respectively. After analyzing the process, those applied methods do strengthen the reliability of the web survey system. Admittedly, there are problems that are not under the control of the system. In the future work, we will carry on studies on them.