Software Design Guidelines for Usability

For years, the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community has crafted usability guidelines that clearly define what
characteristics a software system should have in order to be easy to use. However, in the Software Engineering (SE)
community keep falling short of successfully incorporating these recommendations into software projects. From a SE
perspective, the process of incorporating usability features into software is not always straightforward, as a large number
of these features have heavy implications in the underlying software architecture. For example, successfully including an
“undo” feature in an application requires the design and implementation of many complex interrelated data structures and
functionalities. Our work is focused upon providing developers with a set of software design patterns to assist them in the
process of designing more usable software. This would contribute to the proper inclusion of specific usability features
with high impact on the software design. Preliminary validation data show that usage of the guidelines also has positive
effects on development time and overall software design quality

Pattern languages in HCI: A critical review

This article presents a critical review of patterns and pattern languages in human-computer interaction (HCI). In recent years, patterns and pattern languages have received considerable attention in HCI for their potential as a means for developing and communicating information and knowledge to support good design. This review examines the background to patterns and pattern languages in HCI, and seeks to locate pattern languages in relation to other approaches to interaction design. The review explores four key issues: What is a pattern? What is a pattern language? How are patterns and pattern languages used? and How are values reflected in the pattern-based approach to design? Following on from the review, a future research agenda is proposed for patterns and pattern languages in HCI

Reuse of a usability functionality implementation in web applications

Volumen dedicated to CENTERIS 2013 - Conference on ENTERprise Information Systems / ProjMAN 2013 - International Conference on Project MANagement/ HCIST 2013 - International Conference on Health and Social Care Information Systems and TechnologiesSoftware system usability is recognized as a quality attribute related not only to the user interface but also to applications design. In this paper we analyse the feasibility of designing and programming reusable solutions for implementing usability features that have a major impact on design. We develop case studies to find common application scenarios, responsibilities, classes, methods, attributes and chunks of code, which we use to propose reusable solutions specified as patterns. In this paper we report the results for the progress feedback usability functionality.This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation Tecnologías para la Replicación y Síntesis de Experimentos en IS (TIN2011-23216) and Go Lite (TIN2011-24139) projects

Accessible user interface support for multi-device ubiquitous applications: architectural modifiability considerations

The market for personal computing devices is rapidly expanding from PC, to mobile, home entertainment systems, and even the automotive industry. When developing software targeting such ubiquitous devices, the balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue. With the rise of Web technology and the Internet of things, ubiquitous applications have become a reality. Nonetheless, the diversity of presentation and interaction modalities still drastically limit the number of targetable devices and the accessibility toward end users. This paper presents webinos, a multi-device application middleware platform founded on the Future Internet infrastructure. Hereto, the platform's architectural modifiability considerations are described and evaluated as a generic enabler for supporting applications, which are executed in ubiquitous computing environments

Design and programming patterns for implementing usability functionalities in web applications

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Journal of Systems and Software. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Journal of Systems and Software, VOL 105, (2015) DOI 10.1016/j.jss.2015.04.023Usability is a software system quality attribute. There are usability issues that have an impact not only on the user interface but also on the core functionality of applications. In this paper, three web applications were developed to discover patterns for implementing two usability functionalities with an impact on core functionality: Abort Operation and Progress Feedback. We applied an inductive process in order to identify reusable elements to implement the selected functionalities. For communication purposes, these elements are specified as design and programming patterns (PHP, VB.NET and Java). Another two web applications were developed in order to evaluate the patterns. The evaluation explores several issues such as ease of pattern understanding and ease of pattern use, as well as the final result of the applications. We found that it is feasible to reuse the identified solutions specified as patterns. The results also show that usability functionalities have features, like the level of coupling with the application or the complexity of each component of the solution, that simplify or complicate their implementation. In this case, the Abort Operation functionality turned out to be more feasible to implement than the Progress Feedback functionality.This research has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation “Tecnologías para la Replicación y Síntesis de Experimentosen IS” (TIN2011-23216) and “Go Lite” (TIN2011-24139) projects

POSIWID and determinism in design for behaviour change

Copyright @ 2012 Social Services Research GroupWhen designing to influence behaviour for social or environmental benefit, does designers' intent matter? Or are the effects on behaviour more important, regardless of the intent involved? This brief paper explores -- in the context of design for behaviour change -- some treatments of design, intentionality, purpose and responsibility from a variety of fields, including Stafford Beer's "The purpose of a system is what it does" and Maurice Broady's perspective on determinism. The paper attempts to extract useful implications for designers working on behaviour-related problems, in terms of analytical or reflective questions to ask during the design process

Towards a Tool-based Development Methodology for Pervasive Computing Applications

Despite much progress, developing a pervasive computing application remains a challenge because of a lack of conceptual frameworks and supporting tools. This challenge involves coping with heterogeneous devices, overcoming the intricacies of distributed systems technologies, working out an architecture for the application, encoding it in a program, writing specific code to test the application, and finally deploying it. This paper presents a design language and a tool suite covering the development life-cycle of a pervasive computing application. The design language allows to define a taxonomy of area-specific building-blocks, abstracting over their heterogeneity. This language also includes a layer to define the architecture of an application, following an architectural pattern commonly used in the pervasive computing domain. Our underlying methodology assigns roles to the stakeholders, providing separation of concerns. Our tool suite includes a compiler that takes design artifacts written in our language as input and generates a programming framework that supports the subsequent development stages, namely implementation, testing, and deployment. Our methodology has been applied on a wide spectrum of areas. Based on these experiments, we assess our approach through three criteria: expressiveness, usability, and productivity

Architectures v/s Microservices

As it evolves, technology has always found a better way to build applications and improve their efficiency. New techniques have been learned by adapting old technologies and observing how markets shift towards new trends to satisfy their customers and shareholders. By taking Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and evolving techniques in cloud computing, Web 2.0 emerged with a new pattern for designing an architecture evolved from the conventional monolithic approach known as microservice architecture (MSA). This new pattern develops an application by breaking the substantial use into a group of smaller applications, which run on their processes and communicate through an API. This style of application development is suitable for many infrastructures, especially within a cloud environment. These new patterns advanced to satisfy the concepts of domain-driven, continuous integration, and automated infrastructure more effectively. MSA has created a way to develop and deploy small scalable applications, which allows enterprise-level applications to dynamically adjust to their resources. This paper discusses what that architecture is, what makes it necessary, what factors affect best-fit architecture choices, how microservices-based architecture has evolved, and what factors are driving service-based architectures, in addition to comparing SOA and microservice. By analyzing a few popular architectures, the factors which help in choosing the architecture design will be compared with the MSA to show the benefits and challenges that may arise as an enterprise shifts their developing architecture to microservices

Reusable Solutions for Implementing Usability Functionalities

Electronic version of an article published as International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, Volume 25, Issue 04, May 2015, 727 http://dx.doi.org/10.1142/S0218194015500084 © World Scientific Publishing Company http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscinet/ijsekeUsability is a software system quality attribute. Although software engineers originally considered usability to be related exclusively to the user interface, it was later found to affect the core functionality of software applications. As of then, proposals for addressing usability at different stages of the software development cycle were researched. The objective of this paper is to present three reusable solutions at detailed design and programming level in order to effectively implement the Abort Operation, Progress Feedback and Preferences usability functionalities in web applications. To do this, an inductive research method was applied. We developed three web applications including the above usability functionalities as case studies. We looked for commonalities across the implementations in order to induce a general solution. The elements common to all three developed applications include: application scenarios, functionalities, responsibilities, classes, methods, attributes and code snippets. The findings were specified as an implementation-oriented design pattern and as programming patterns in three languages. Additional case studies were conducted in order to validate the proposed solution. The independent developers used the patterns to implement different applications for each case study. As a result, we found that solutions specified as patterns can be reused to develop web applications.This work has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation “Tecnologías para la Replicación y Síntesis de Experimentos en IS” (TIN2011-23216) and “Go Lite” (TIN2011-24139) projects

Road to Microservices

This document intends to elucidate the complexity of microservices decomposition and this its inherent process of implementation. Developments in technology and design, achieving higher performance, reliability, or lowering costs are valid reasons to consider controlling the product’s quality by guaranteeing its conformance with established characteristics and standards. Control is made possible by adding quality control, inspection routines, and trend analysis to a manufacturing process. These techniques are established in the Quality field academically and business-wise. Repeat Part Management (RPM) is software that allows users to apply these techniques efficiently and has brought value to the company. However, RPM has been growing, and issues have emerged due to customer needs - accumulated technical debt. These ever-growing modifications are common through different business areas, and architectures’ research evolution has accompanied them. This demand for highly modifiable, rapid development, and independent systems has resulted in the adoption of microservices. There is a concern for existing systems for decomposition due to the characteristics of microservices, which encourages approach/technique research. This architecture promotes legacy system analysis to map current functionalities and dependencies between components. Furthermore, critical concepts in a microservices architecture are researched and implemented in a new system that encompasses Repeat Part Management’s functionalities. This thesis explores the microservices’ architecture evolution with an already defined mature domain in quality assessment.Este documento pretende especificar a complexidade do processo de decomposição em microsserviços e do seu processo de implementação. Avanços na tecnologia e design, alcançar melhor performance, ou a confiabilidade do produto, ou diminuir custos são justificações válidas para considerar controlar a qualidade do produto e, inerentemente, garantir a sua conformidade com as características previamente definidas e com padrões da indústria. É possível garantir controlo sob os produtos ao acrescentar, ao processo produtivo, métodos de controlo de qualidade, rotinas de inspeção e análise de tendências (de desvio). Estas técnicas estão bem estabelecidas academicamente e, de um ponto de vista do mercado, na área da Qualidade e garantia da qualidade. O Repeat Part Management (RPM) é um software que permite aos seus utilizadores a utilização eficiente destas técnicas de qualidade, o que resulta numa adição de valor para a empresa. Porém, devido às crescentes necessidades dos clientes, alguns problemas têm sido identificados - relacionados com o conceito de acumulação de technical debt. Esta crescente necessidade de alteração é comum em diversas áreas de negócio, e a investigação de soluções arquiteturais tem acompanhado esta pesquisa. Esta solução arquitetura pode ser caracterizada pela facilidade de sistemas facilmente modificáveis, pelo rápido desenvolvimento e implementação, e pela independência dos serviços decompostos. Aquando de uma migração para microsserviços num sistema maturo, existe uma maior preocupação na decomposição da aplicação e definição dos serviços dada a característica dos microsserviços, o que incentiva a uma pesquisa detalhada sobre as técnicas de decomposição. Pela mesma razão, esta arquitetura incentiva ao mapeamento e documentação das dependências entre serviços e componentes e o estudo da aplicação legacy. Para além disto, estes conceitos, e a sua implementação devem ser planeados, justificados e documentados, o que explica a complexidade do processo de migração e implementação, que deve ter em consideração as funcionalidades existentes no Repeat Part Management. Dessa forma, esta tese explora a implementação desta arquitetura numa aplicação matura na área de Garantia de Qualidade