A Case Study of the Effects of a Web Interface Redesign Based on Usability Guidelines.

Usability guidelines for user interface (UI) design formulated by Nielsen and other authorities were used to redesign the web interface for a web based distance education course. The website\u27s original UI, as judged by a group of web design professionals, violated standard guidelines for usability, readability, learnability, consistency, efficiency of use and flexibility. The original and redesigned UIs were tested using thinking aloud testing, a user satisfaction survey, and usability inspection. The results of user testing and heuristic evaluation suggest that the use of these guidelines in website redesign had a positive impact on user performance. A more conclusive result would have required a larger sample size and a redesigned testing protocol that varied the order in which participants worked with the old and redesigned interfaces

Framework for Security Transparency in Cloud Computing

The migration of sensitive data and applications from the on-premise data centre to a cloud environment increases cyber risks to users, mainly because the cloud environment is managed and maintained by a third-party. In particular, the partial surrender of sensitive data and application to a cloud environment creates numerous concerns that are related to a lack of security transparency. Security transparency involves the disclosure of information by cloud service providers about the security measures being put in place to protect assets and meet the expectations of customers. It establishes trust in service relationship between cloud service providers and customers, and without evidence of continuous transparency, trust and confidence are affected and are likely to hinder extensive usage of cloud services. Also, insufficient security transparency is considered as an added level of risk and increases the difficulty of demonstrating conformance to customer requirements and ensuring that the cloud service providers adequately implement security obligations. The research community have acknowledged the pressing need to address security transparency concerns, and although technical aspects for ensuring security and privacy have been researched widely, the focus on security transparency is still scarce. The relatively few literature mostly approach the issue of security transparency from cloud providers’ perspective, while other works have contributed feasible techniques for comparison and selection of cloud service providers using metrics such as transparency and trustworthiness. However, there is still a shortage of research that focuses on improving security transparency from cloud users’ point of view. In particular, there is still a gap in the literature that (i) dissects security transparency from the lens of conceptual knowledge up to implementation from organizational and technical perspectives and; (ii) support continuous transparency by enabling the vetting and probing of cloud service providers’ conformity to specific customer requirements. The significant growth in moving business to the cloud – due to its scalability and perceived effectiveness – underlines the dire need for research in this area. This thesis presents a framework that comprises the core conceptual elements that constitute security transparency in cloud computing. It contributes to the knowledge domain of security transparency in cloud computing by proposing the following. Firstly, the research analyses the basics of cloud security transparency by exploring the notion and foundational concepts that constitute security transparency. Secondly, it proposes a framework which integrates various concepts from requirement engineering domain and an accompanying process that could be followed to implement the framework. The framework and its process provide an essential set of conceptual ideas, activities and steps that can be followed at an organizational level to attain security transparency, which are based on the principles of industry standards and best practices. Thirdly, for ensuring continuous transparency, the thesis proposes an essential tool that supports the collection and assessment of evidence from cloud providers, including the establishment of remedial actions for redressing deficiencies in cloud provider practices. The tool serves as a supplementary component of the proposed framework that enables continuous inspection of how predefined customer requirements are being satisfied. The thesis also validates the proposed security transparency framework and tool in terms of validity, applicability, adaptability, and acceptability using two different case studies. Feedbacks are collected from stakeholders and analysed using essential criteria such as ease of use, relevance, usability, etc. The result of the analysis illustrates the validity and acceptability of both the framework and tool in enhancing security transparency in a real-world environment

Website accessibility in Australia and the national transition strategy: Outcomes and findings

In the most recent statistics, published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2012, it was reported that slightly under one in five people stated they had a disability. A further twenty-one percent of the population (4.7 million people) reported that they had a long-term health condition that did not restrict their everyday activities. This total group of people who suffer either a disability or a long-term health condition numbers 8.9 million people, or over thirty-nine percent of the Australian population. Of the people reporting a disability, 3.7 million or eighty-eight percent of that group experienced limitations in the activities of self-care, mobility or communication, or were restricted in their education or employment. (W3C, 2013c) In 2010, the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) reported that an estimated one in five Australians or 3.95 million people experienced long term impairment. Of this figure, 2.6 million, or roughly fifteen percent of the population, of people with long term impairments are under the age of 65. At that time it was stated that eighty-six percent report that they experience a core limitation, which involves their mobility or communication and may restrict either their schooling or employment. (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2010; Begbie, 2010) According to these figures, it would appear that the number of people with disabilities that restrict their daily lives has grown in line with population growth. In June 2010,the Australian Government released the Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy (NTS) (Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), 2010a). This document outlines the plan for the adoption and implementation of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Version 2.0 (W3C, 2008d). This plan provides a strategy for all government websites to conform to WCAG 2.0 Priority Level A by December 2012 and Australian Government sites to WCAG 2.0 Priority Level AA by December 2014. In Australia, the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) is responsible for administering the Disability Discrimination Act of 1992 (DDA) (Australian Government, 2013a) In order to assist organisations in complying with the DDA, the AHRC has produced the World Wide Web Access: Disability Discrimination Act Advisory Notes Version 4.0 (Advisory Notes). (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2010). These Advisory Notes reinforce the NTS, but also advise all non-government website holders to ensure their websites are compliant to WCAG 2.0 (W3C, 2008d). New non-government websites must adhere to WCAG 2.0 AA, and existing website owners have until December 31, 2013 to comply with this same level. (Australian Human Rights Commission, 2010) Australians have clearly embraced using the Web as their preferred method of dealing with the various levels of government. It is estimated that there are over 4600 registered domains in the gov.au space, with more than 4.2 million documents. Australians enter the federal government web space through ‘www.australia.gov.au’ which has led the transition to WCAG 2.0 by declaring their site compliant to WCAG 2.0 AA, with some elements complying with the AAA level. (Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), 2009). The purpose of this research was to determine whether such a mandated approach by way of a federal government strategy would accomplish the goal of achieving compliance with WCAG 2.0. In order to accomplish this research goal, a selection of websites from government websites was assessed on a regular basis to observe their accessibility changes during the period of the NTS. In addition, this study included websites from non-government sites in order to observe their accessibility changes and also to compare these results with the government website results. The websites were selected in a targeted sample approach in an attempt to choose websites that would enable comparison of the accessibility results. For instance, the same category of websites from each state was selected including the state library, health, disability services, job search, emergency services and business development. Federal government websites were chosen to reflect these same categories plus additional websites with which it was considered Australians had the most contact, including but not limited to broadcasting, tax, health, and information services. The not-for-profit websites chosen represented those considered most well-known, while those selected for the government-affiliated category included a university from each state plus two utilities. The corporate website category included representatives from large corporations such as banks, airlines, mining companies and major shopping as well as representatives selected from organisations such as telecommunications, travel, public transportation, telecommunications and multimedia. In the local government category, the capital city and next largest city in terms of population was chosen from each state. The selection of websites was done in consultation with academic supervisors, members of the W3C as well as in consultation with staff at the Australian Government Information Management Office. Barriers in achieving compliance with WCAG 2.0 and critical success factors for those organisations which achieved the greatest level of compliance were identified both through the evaluation data and also through the surveys conducted throughout the research. The lack of a unified methodology for testing the websites for accessibility was highlighted as an area which needs to be addressed if the Government is to be able to conduct checks on agencies to monitor their progress toward achieving compliance with these accepted standards. The results of this research demonstrate that very few organisations succeeded in meeting even Level A of WCAG by the deadline of December 31, 2012. It is clear however that the government websites achieved greater compliance scores than non-government. In particular, the federal government websites both started as the most accessible and retained that position to the end of the data collection period. While very few websites in this research were successful in achieving compliance with WCAG 2.0 to even Level A, the NTS was successful in the raising of awareness of the issues and requirements of website accessibility, particularly for government agencies. Conversely, this means that the gap between the accessibility of government and non-government websites has widened which is clearly demonstrated by the results of this research

Assessment of web accessibility and technical specifications conformance of web sites from four EU member states

The Internet is playing an important part in our day to day life, through its power of making information universally available. Provided that web content is designed with accessibility in mind, the Internet can bring immense benefits to people with restricted access to different aspects of life due to various types of disability. An important source for accessible web design resources is the W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). WAI published the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0)[1] in May 1999, which is now a reference point in web accessibility related policies in many different jurisdictions. An automated web accessibility surveying system investigating W3C WCAG 1.0 and HTML technical conformance of large samples of web sites, was implemented at the eAccess laboratory at RINCE, D.C.U.,Dublin, Ireland. In order to evaluate the practical results of the efforts invested in promoting web accessibility in Ireland, the conformance level of a sample of subjectively selected Irish web sites was monitored between April 2002 and December 2004. In order to place the web accessibility conformance level of Irish web sites at EU level, conformance levels of samples of randomly selected Irish, UK, French and German web sites were also monitored between May 2003 and December 2004. The findings of the study show that the general level of web accessibility guidelines and HTML standards conformance in all the web samples studied is very poor and there were no clearly distinguishable improvements in the time interval considered. More than that, although the web samples differ greatly through the number of web sites considered, the results show a high similarity in the failures detected in the five web samples, over the entire time interval in which the investigations were carried out. These findings show that the efforts invested in promoting web accessibility until now have had a small impact in reality. The findings also suggest the need for a different, more firm, approach in promoting web accessibility guidelines compliance on the web

Software process quality models: a comparative evaluation

Numerous software processes are implemented by software organisations in the production and maintenance of software products. Varying levels of success are observed in their execution, as processes vary in content and quality. A number of quality models for software processes have been published, each of which is intended to encompass the totality of quality factors and issues relevant to a specific notion of process quality. These quality models may be used to develop a new process, measure the quality of existing processes, or guide improvement of existing processes. It is therefore desirable that mechanisms exist to select the model of highest intrinsic quality and greatest relevance. In this thesis, mechanisms are proposed for the comparative evaluation of software process quality models. Case studies are performed in which existing software process quality models are applied to existing software processes. Case study results are used in empirical evaluation of models to augment theoretical evaluation results. Specific recommendations are made for selection of models against typical selection criteria. Assessment is performed of the assessment procedures against defined success criteria. Theoretical evaluation procedures are developed to measure process quality models against defined quality criteria. Measurements are performed of conformance of models to the requirements set for an ideal process quality model, and the relevance of model content to defined stakeholders in software processes. Comparison is also made of the scope and size of models. Empirical evaluation procedures are developed to assess model performance in the context of application to real software processes. These procedures assess the extent to which the results of process measurement using process quality models are observed to differ, and hence the importance of selecting one model in preference to others. Measurement is also performed of the extent of difference in the software processes evaluated in the case studies

Structuring Guidelines for Web Application Designers - A Meta-model

International audienc

Automated compliance checking in healthcare building design

Regulatory frameworks associated to building design are usually complex, representing extensive sets of requirements. For healthcare projects in the UK, this includes statutory and guidance documents. Existing research indicates that they contain subjective requirements, which challenge the practical adoption of automated compliance checking, leading to limited outcomes. This paper aims to propose recommendations for the adoption of automated compliance checking in the design of healthcare buildings. Design Science Research was used to gain a detailed understanding of how information from existing regulatory requirements affects automation, through an empirical study in the design of a primary healthcare facility. In this study, a previously proposed taxonomy was implemented and refined, resulting in the identification of different types of subjective requirements. Based on empirical data emerging from the research, a set of recommendations was proposed focusing on the revision of regulatory documents, as well as to aid designers implementing automated compliance in practice

AUTOMATED ANALYSIS OF NATURAL-LANGUAGE REQUIREMENTS USING NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING

Natural Language (NL) is arguably the most common vehicle for specifying requirements. This dissertation devises automated assistance for some important tasks that requirements engineers need to perform in order to structure, manage, and elaborate NL requirements in a sound and effective manner. The key enabling technology underlying the work in this dissertation is Natural Language Processing (NLP). All the solutions presented herein have been developed and empirically evaluated in close collaboration with industrial partners. The dissertation addresses four different facets of requirements analysis: • Checking conformance to templates. Requirements templates are an effective tool for improving the structure and quality of NL requirements statements. When templates are used for specifying the requirements, an important quality assurance task is to ensure that the requirements conform to the intended templates. We develop an automated solution for checking the conformance of requirements to templates. • Extraction of glossary terms. Requirements glossaries (dictionaries) improve the understandability of requirements, and mitigate vagueness and ambiguity. We develop an auto- mated solution for supporting requirements analysts in the selection of glossary terms and their related terms. • Extraction of domain models. By providing a precise representation of the main concepts in a software project and the relationships between these concepts, a domain model serves as an important artifact for systematic requirements elaboration. We propose an automated approach for domain model extraction from requirements. The extraction rules in our approach encompass both the rules already described in the literature as well as a number of important extensions developed in this dissertation. • Identifying the impact of requirements changes. Uncontrolled change in requirements presents a major risk to the success of software projects. We address two different dimen- sions of requirements change analysis in this dissertation: First, we develop an automated approach for predicting how a change to one requirement impacts other requirements. Next, we consider the propagation of change from requirements to design. To this end, we develop an automated approach for predicting how the design of a system is impacted by changes made to the requirements