Empirical Analysis of the Relationship between Trust and Willingness to Provide Data in Software Development

Collecting software-related data is essential to improve software quality and software development processes. To promote such data collection, we analyzed users' willingness to provide data, focusing on three types of data collection: software crash reports, user operation logs of applications, and engineers' operation logs in software development. We emphasized the importance of trust in data collectors, as higher trust is expected to lead to greater willingness to provide data. The effects of trust may vary depending on the type of data collection, as the perceived severity of data for users can also differ between types. Using questionnaires, we analyzed users' willingness to participate in data collection, and the results suggest that the impact of trust in data collectors varies across data types. It is particularly weak when collecting crash reports but becomes crucial for software development-related data.