Paper Title
Towards Promoting Usable Software: Incorporating Usability Evaluation Into Software Development Enviroments Based on ISO Standards
Abstract
Usability evaluation is essential for developing usable software systems, yet its integration within the development process is an interdisciplinary endeavour that remains challenging. Different priorities and approaches hinder collaboration between professionals from usability and software engineering, as well as pre-existing organizational activities, methods and artifacts. Current usability evaluation integration solutions are highly specific to their operational areas, leading to poor transferability of activities or methods to other practical contexts. We think that a more abstract basis of incorporation would remove process or organization-specific details that hinder interdisciplinary collaboration. Thus, this paper proposes using ISO standards as a solid basis for incorporating usability evaluation into the software development process. Furthermore, standards are universally agreed guidelines, thus are a reasonable basis for bringing a more transferable incorporation process. We created a comprehensive model consisting of fundamental activities and artifacts from usability engineering (limited to usability evaluation) and from software engineering (also limited to development process). Common activities were identified; whereas artifacts and dependencies were established, resulting in an incorporation model that is more clearly for organizations to compare and discuss their processes.
Keywords- Usability, Usability Evaluation, Software Development Process, ISO Standards.