STATUS Project

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PROJECT OBJECTIVES

 

Our research in the STATUS project has been motivated by the understanding that usability is not something that can be easily "added" to a software product during late stage, since software quality is determined and restricted by the whole development process. In this context, the STATUS project has addressed two complementary issues:

 

  • On one hand, we have studied the relationship between usability and software architecture, using as basis the idea that quality attributes are determined and restricted by architectural design. So, as usability is an important quality attribute we thought that it might be interesting to study how this attribute can be analysed from an architectural point of view.

 

 

 

Relationship Usability/Software Architecture

 

In order to deal with the relationship between usability and software architecture we have defined what we have named “Usability Framework”. This framework basically organises the different usability issues found in literature in different abstraction levels so it is easy to find a relationship between some of them and the software architecture.

 

We have also worked on different approximations to asses whether a software architecture supports usability:

·        A static assessment of software architecture

·        A dynamic assessment of software architecture

Relationship Usability/Software Process

Usability techniques have traditionally been addressed under the HCI field. In the STATUS project we have studied them according to a SE perspective that allows identifying the most relevant techniques to be incorporated into a software process.

 

In particular in the STATUS project we worked on the following issues:

 

-           We identified a set of HCI techniques that might be applied in a software process.

-           We mapped such techniques to particular activities in a software process.

-           We defined the different moments in a software process to apply each usability technique.

 

The details of the research results can be found at Deliverable 6.6. Additionally, you can also access to the results packaged for developers.