Usability Evaluation Framework for Software Engineering Methodologies

Abstract—According to software quality models published usability is an important quality attribute to measure how usable and effective/useful is the software system. Concept of usability has been applied to improve the quality of software systems, human computer interaction, software process improvement, and software process descriptions. Over the years different usability models have been proposed listing the factors, criteria and metrics to measure the usability of software systems, software processes, and software process descriptions. Since usability evaluation is a difficult task varioususability evaluation methods (UEM) have been proposed to describe different processes for systematic and effective way for usability evaluation. Concept of usability can be applied to software engineering methodologies to find how usable and useful a methodology is for software engineers or software development organizations, and it can also be used by method engineers or meta-model developers for method engineering to improve the usability of software engineering methods. Usability models and Usability evaluation methods proposed for software systems cannot be applied directly to software engineering methodologies due to difference of domains, concepts, and end users. In this work a usability evaluation framework is proposed which comprises usability factors and their description, criteria and their description to measure factors, importance and grading of criteria fulfillment, guidelines to apply the framework and overall evaluation process.

Index Terms—Software engineering, usability evaluation, software engineering methodologies, software quality.

Zafar Masood and Shang Xuequn are with Nwpuxian, China (e-mail: zafar_iiui@hotmail.com, shang@nwpu.edu.cn).
Jamal Yousaf is with Tsinghua Beijing, China (e-mail: jamal_qau@hotmail.com).

[PDF]

Cite: Zafar Masood, Shang Xuequn, and Jamal Yousaf, "Usability Evaluation Framework for Software Engineering Methodologies," Lecture Notes on Software Engineering vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 225-232, 2014.