A pilot empirical study of applying a usability technique in an open source software project

Context: The growth in the number of non-technical open source software (OSS) application users and the escalating use of these applications have redoubled the need for, and interest in, developing usable OSS. OSS communities are unclear about which techniques to use in each development process activity. Objective: The aim of our research is to adapt a usability technique (visual brainstorming) to an OSS project and evaluate the feasibility of its application. Method: We used the case study research method to investigate technique application and participation in a project. To do this, we participated as volunteers in the HistoryCal project. Results: We identified adverse conditions that were an obstacle to technique application (like it was not easy to recruit OSS users to participate) and modified the technique to make it applicable. Conclusion: We conclude that these changes were helpful for applying the technique using web artifacts like blogsThis research was funded by the SENESCYT , Quevedo State Tech- nical University, TIN2014-52129-R and TIN2014-60490-P projects and the e-Madrid project (S2013/ICE-2715

Applying a User-centred Approach to Interactive Visualization Design

Analysing users in their context of work and finding out how and why they use different information resources is essential to provide interactive visualisation systems that match their goals and needs. Designers should actively involve the intended users throughout the whole process. This chapter presents a user-centered approach for the design of interactive visualisation systems. We describe three phases of the iterative visualisation design process: the early envisioning phase, the global specification hase, and the detailed specification phase. The whole design cycle is repeated until some criterion of success is reached. We discuss different techniques for the analysis of users, their tasks and domain. Subsequently, the design of prototypes and evaluation methods in visualisation practice are presented. Finally, we discuss the practical challenges in design and evaluation of collaborative visualisation environments. Our own case studies and those of others are used throughout the whole chapter to illustrate various approaches

Adapting usability techniques for application in open source Software: A multiple case study

Context: As a result of the growth of non-developer users of OSS applications, usability has over the last ten years begun to attract the interest of the open source software (OSS) community. The OSS community has some special characteristics (such as worldwide geographical distribution of both users and developers and missing resources) which are an obstacle to the direct adoption of many usability techniques as specified in the human-computer interaction (HCI) field. Objective: The aim of this research is to adapt and evaluate the feasibility of applying four usability techniques: user profiles, personas, direct observation and post-test information to four OSS projects from the viewpoint of the development team. Method: The applied research method was a multiple case study of the following OSS projects: Quite Universal Circuit Simulator, PSeInt, FreeMind and OpenOffice Writer. Results: We formalized the application procedure of each of the adapted usability techniques. We found that either there were no procedures for adopting usability techniques in OSS or they were not fully systematized. Additionally, we identified the adverse conditions that are an obstacle to their adoption in OSS and propose the special adaptations required to overcome the obstacles. To avoid some of the adverse conditions, we created web artefacts (online survey, wiki and forum) that are very popular in the OSS field. Conclusion: It is necessary to adapt usability techniques for application in OSS projects considering their idiosyncrasy. Additionally, we found that there are obstacles (for example, number of participant users, biased information provided by developers) to the application of the techniques. Despite these obstacles, it is feasible to apply the adapted techniques in OSS projectsThis research was funded by the Secretariat of Higher Education, Science, Technology and Innovation (SENESCYT) of the Government of Ecuador as part of an academic scholarship granted for postgradu- ate training, and Quevedo State Technical University through doctoral scholarships for university professors. Also this research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports FLEXOR ( TIN2014-52129-R ) and TIN2014-60490-P projects and the eMadrid- CM project ( S2013/ICE-2715 ). Finally, this research received funding from the University of Atacama “DIUDA 22316 ”projec

Why Do Developers Get Password Storage Wrong? A Qualitative Usability Study

Passwords are still a mainstay of various security systems, as well as the cause of many usability issues. For end-users, many of these issues have been studied extensively, highlighting problems and informing design decisions for better policies and motivating research into alternatives. However, end-users are not the only ones who have usability problems with passwords! Developers who are tasked with writing the code by which passwords are stored must do so securely. Yet history has shown that this complex task often fails due to human error with catastrophic results. While an end-user who selects a bad password can have dire consequences, the consequences of a developer who forgets to hash and salt a password database can lead to far larger problems. In this paper we present a first qualitative usability study with 20 computer science students to discover how developers deal with password storage and to inform research into aiding developers in the creation of secure password systems

A Holistic Usability Framework For Distributed Simulation Systems

This dissertation develops a holistic usability framework for distributed simulation systems (DSSs). The framework is developed considering relevant research in human-computer interaction, computer science, technical writing, engineering, management, and psychology. The methodology used consists of three steps: (1) framework development, (2) surveys of users to validate and refine the framework, and to determine attribute weights, and (3) application of the framework to two real-world systems. The concept of a holistic usability framework for DSSs arose during a project to improve the usability of the Virtual Test Bed, a prototypical DSS, and the framework is partly a result of that project. In addition, DSSs at Ames Research Center were studied for additional insights. The framework has six dimensions: end user needs, end user interface(s), programming, installation, training, and documentation. The categories of participants in this study include managers, researchers, programmers, end users, trainers, and trainees. The first survey was used to obtain qualitative and quantitative data to validate and refine the framework. Attributes that failed the validation test were dropped from the framework. A second survey was used to obtain attribute weights. The refined framework was used to evaluate two existing DSSs, measuring their holistic usabilities. Ensuring that the needs of the variety of types of users who interact with the system during design, development, and use are met is important to launch a successful system. Adequate consideration of system usability along the several dimensions in the framework will not only ensure system success but also increase productivity, lower life cycle costs, and result in a more pleasurable working experience for people who work with the system

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

An analytical inspection framework for evaluating the search tactics and user profiles supported by information seeking interfaces

Searching is something we do everyday both in digital and physical environments. Whether we are searching for books in a library or information on the web, search is becoming increasingly important. For many years, however, the standard for search in software has been to provide a keyword search box that has, over time, been embellished with query suggestions, Boolean operators, and interactive feedback. More recent research has focused on designing search interfaces that better support exploration and learning. Consequently, the aim of this research has been to develop a framework that can reveal to designers how well their search interfaces support different styles of searching behaviour.The primary contribution of this research has been to develop a usability evaluation method, in the form of a lightweight analytical inspection framework, that can assess both search designs and fully implemented systems. The framework, called Sii, provides three types of analyses: 1) an analysis of the amount of support the different features of a design provide; 2) an analysis of the amount of support provided for 32 known search tactics; and 3) an analysis of the amount of support provided for 16 different searcher profiles, such as those who are finding, browsing, exploring, and learning. The design of the framework was validated by six independent judges, and the results were positively correlated against the results of empirical user studies. Further, early investigations showed that Sii has a learning curve that begins at around one and a half hours, and, when using identical analysis results, different evaluators produce similar design revisions.For Search experts, building interfaces for their systems, Sii provides a Human-Computer Interaction evaluation method that addresses searcher needs rather than system optimisation. For Human-Computer Interaction experts, designing novel interfaces that provide search functions, Sii provides the opportunity to assess designs using the knowledge and theories generated by the Information Seeking community. While the research reported here is under controlled environments, future work is planned that will investigate the use of Sii by independent practitioners on their own projects

Predicting with sparse data

It is well known that effective prediction of project cost related factors is an important aspect of software engineering. Unfortunately, despite extensive research over more than 30 years, this remains a significant problem for many practitioners. A major obstacle is the absence of reliable and systematic historic data, yet this is a sine qua non for almost all proposed methods: statistical, machine learning or calibration of existing models. In this paper we describe our sparse data method (SDM) based upon a pairwise comparison technique and Saaty's Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Our minimum data requirement is a single known point. The technique is supported by a software tool known as DataSalvage. We show, for data from two companies, how our approach — based upon expert judgement — adds value to expert judgement by producing significantly more accurate and less biased results. A sensitivity analysis shows that our approach is robust to pairwise comparison errors. We then describe the results of a small usability trial with a practising project manager. From this empirical work we conclude that the technique is promising and may help overcome some of the present barriers to effective project prediction