Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Improving the performance and effectiveness of usability engineering in software and product development in companies is perceived as a true challenge by many usability professionals. Findings from interviews and observations in eleven assessments of usability engineering processes indicate that usability engineering include typically problems such as poor impact of usability activities in product designs; limited skills and knowledge on usability among the designers and management; unawareness on various activities of usability engineering life-cycle; inappropriately used usability methods; even political games around usability. On the other hand, issues such as project and configuration management, and process performance measures are not the key problems of usability. It is concluded other kinds of methods but standard process assessment should be considered for revealing the problems of usability engineering. The problems identified in the assessment should be clearly communicated to the management, but for developers an assessment should aim for a constructive training occasion on usability.

This paper describes an evaluation of a characterisation framework to analyse mobile work scenarios in order to make corresponding software systems. The framework identifies complexity issues to be taken into account when implementing a system. The framework can also be used to elicit requirements from a scenario. Three research questions are investigated in this evaluation: 1) Can the framework be used to identify relevant challenges in the final system? 2) Can the framework be used to identify functional requirements for the final system? and 3) Can the framework be used to identify non-functional requirements for the final system? The evaluation was performed using the framework to analyse and implement an IT-support scenario. The paper also describes a web-tool for this framework that makes the characterisation process simpler. The tool introduces consistency rules to ensure stricter characterisation of the scenarios.

Mobile application development is a challenging task for the software companies due to complicated technological and business environments. Patterns have been recognised to be a valuable tool in software development, for they allow design experiences and solutions to be documented systematically and facilitate the communication of design issues. Patterns can be seen as a part of organisational memory, a means to preserve the design knowledge and enable its reuse in later products and projects. In this paper we study how the design patterns can support organisational memory in mobile application design. We present the utilisation of patterns as a dynamic process and analyse their relationship and suitability to the process of organisational memory. As a result, we present a framework, which can be used for supporting and evaluation of patterns as a means for storing organisational memory in software companies.

Software companies adopt patterns as a means to improve architecture and design practices. During recent years, the application of patterns has extended from general software applications to specific problem domains. In a new domain, suitable patterns fitting to the essential design problems in the new context need to be identified. In this paper, we introduce a general architectural model of mobile applications, which can be used to identify and organise essential patterns in mobile-application design process. This model is employed to construct a high-level architecture of a particular application. For each component of the architecture, the model may suggest candidate patterns that can be used for elaborating the component. Subsequently, the results of the design process are used iteratively to further develop the architectural model. The presented model is verified and tested by employing it to address the design problem of supporting multiple user interfaces in a real mobile application product.

Software industries are pursuing the development of software intensive systems with a greater degree of re-use, reduction of costs, and shorter time to market. One of the successful approaches taken is based on the development of sets of similar systems where development efforts are shared. This approach is known as System Families. This article discusses an important issue in system family engineering activities: requirements modelling in system family context. The requirements must contain both the common and variable parts. Also, functional and non-functional aspects have to be considered in system family approach. Besides, an organization framework must be taken into account for requirements management. Some meta-models for these issues in system family are proposed and discussed. Based on the proposed model, a process for requirements management and development according to CMMI practices has been created.

Comprehensive and accurate software requirements capture is essential for successful development of software systems. Enterprise applications have an additional challenge of eliciting requirements that need to be well understood by i) the business users of the system having extensive domain knowledge ii) application developers having extensive system implementation and development knowledge. Current tools vary from providing textual descriptions to formal semantic languages for specifying requirements. The business users are unable to actively participate in the analysis, as formal and textual specifications represent two extreme ends of requirements elicitation. Ambiguity or lack of understanding often poses a challenge on validation and verification of system requirements specification. The paper presents a Use case Specification Framework that brings structure to requirements specification while retaining its simplicity. The framework enables business users to understand and verify functional requirements and two critical non functional requirements – performance and usability.

Software development organizations wanting to introduce usability practices into their defined software process have to undertake laborious efforts for that purpose, since, for the time being, there exists a lack of reference model or framework which indicates where and how in the software process usability needs to be considered. They also have to overcome the important differences between HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) and SE (Software Engineering) in terminology and approach to process definition. We offer developers who have the objective of integrating usability practices into their software process, a framework that characterizes 35 selected HCI techniques in relation to six relevant criteria from a SE viewpoint, and organizes them according to the kind of activities in the development process where they may be applied, and to the best moment of application in an iterative life cycle. The only requirement for the existing software process is to be based on an iterative approach.

FIRM was established in 1996, and has 70 employees in 4 offices (Oslo, London, New York and San Francisco). FIRM delivers one software product: Confirmit. Confirmit is a web-based application which enables organizations to gather, analyze and report key business information across a broad range of commercial applications. Confirmit can be applied to any information-gathering scenario, but its three main data sources are: Customer Feedback, Market Feedback and Employee Feedback.

This paper addresses the almost never-ending headache the role of documentation has given for software projects. has been given recently a focus over , yet the required documents should be authored. This paper “revisits” the approach developed by Nokia improving the documentation work without scarifying the quantity or quality of documentation. The method is called RaPiD7. The cases presented are from Philips Digital Systems Laboratory. This paper elaborates the method by providing insights to applying RaPiD7 in practice, explains the encouraging results of the experiments and gives tips for practitioners of the method by explaining the lessons learned in Philips.

Global Software Development (GSD) is a new challenge for software developers to reach mobility in resources, obtain extra knowledge, speed time-to-market and increase operational efficiency. However, the new trend is followed by specific risks and needs a deeper analysis for successful risk overcoming. This paper gives an insight into a research on GSD project performance improvement in one of the biggest software development companies in Latvia. Project management and coordination in distributed environment is a great challenge, though being not very widely explored. In this paper the author emphasizes the necessity of research in this area and provides an overview of coordination practices used in the organization chosen for the case study.