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
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.
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