Systematic evaluation of design choices for software development tools

[Abstract]: Most design and evaluation of software tools is based on the intuition and experience of the designers. Software tool designers consider themselves typical users of the tools that they build and tend to subjectively evaluate their products rather than objectively evaluate them using established usability methods. This subjective approach is inadequate if the quality of software tools is to improve and the use of more systematic methods is advocated. This paper summarises a sequence of studies that show how user interface design choices for software development tools can be evaluated using established usability engineering techniques. The techniques used included guideline review, predictive modelling and experimental studies with users

Overcoming Language Dichotomies: Toward Effective Program Comprehension for Mobile App Development

Mobile devices and platforms have become an established target for modern software developers due to performant hardware and a large and growing user base numbering in the billions. Despite their popularity, the software development process for mobile apps comes with a set of unique, domain-specific challenges rooted in program comprehension. Many of these challenges stem from developer difficulties in reasoning about different representations of a program, a phenomenon we define as a "language dichotomy". In this paper, we reflect upon the various language dichotomies that contribute to open problems in program comprehension and development for mobile apps. Furthermore, to help guide the research community towards effective solutions for these problems, we provide a roadmap of directions for future work.Comment: Invited Keynote Paper for the 26th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC'18

Study on Human-Computer Interaction Design for Organizational Knowledge Management Portal

Knowledge has been identified as the most crucial commodity in many organizations. To achieve competitive advantage among its competitors in the industries, an organization should take further step ahead to nurture strategies on how to manage knowledge assets as effective and as efficient as possible. However, though the knowledge management system is exist in an organization, it is not fully utilized by the end users due to many reasons like corporate culture, lack of motivation, technology issues, lack of user-friendly layout, etc. The aim of this project is to study the relationship between human-computer interaction and knowledge management system and how these two major elements work together to achieve knowledge management system objectives in a corporate environment. It explores the importance to satisfy user requirements to grant the success of knowledge management system. In addition, the aim is to obtain and shares the efficient and effective strategies on how to build the interactive and friendly user interface for the organizational knowledge management system

A usabilidade das bibliotecas digitais: a perspectiva dos leitores/utilizadores

Neste artigo exploram-se algumas diferenças existentes entre bibliotecas convencionais e bibliotecas digitais, dando-se uma ênfase especial à necessidade dos gestores de bibliotecas digitais compreenderem melhor a interacção de um utilizador com uma biblioteca digital. Cabe ao gestor da biblioteca assegurar que os leitores da biblioteca consigam atingir os seus objectivos de forma eficaz, eficiente, segura e confortável. A usabilidade de uma biblioteca digital pode ser assegurada introduzindo-se, desde as etapas iniciais do seu processo de concepção, utilizadores finais da biblioteca, introduzindo momentos de avaliação ao longo de todo o processo de concepção, desenvolvimento e implementação do sistema, de forma iterativa

Study on Human-Computer Interaction Design for Organizational Knowledge Management Portal

Knowledge has been identified as the most crucial commodity in many organizations. To achieve competitive advantage among its competitors in the industries, an organization should take further step ahead to nurture strategies on how to manage knowledge assets as effective and as efficient as possible. However, though the knowledge management system is exist in an organization, it is not fully utilized by the end users due to many reasons like corporate culture, lack of motivation, technology issues, lack of user-friendly layout, etc. The aim of this project is to study the relationship between human-computer interaction and knowledge management system and how these two major elements work together to achieve knowledge management system objectives in a corporate environment. It explores the importance to satisfy user requirements to grant the success of knowledge management system. In addition, the aim is to obtain and shares the efficient and effective strategies on how to build the interactive and friendly user interface for the organizational knowledge management system

Automating Software Development for Mobile Computing Platforms

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous in today\u27s computing landscape. These devices have ushered in entirely new populations of users, and mobile operating systems are now outpacing more traditional desktop systems in terms of market share. The applications that run on these mobile devices (often referred to as apps ) have become a primary means of computing for millions of users and, as such, have garnered immense developer interest. These apps allow for unique, personal software experiences through touch-based UIs and a complex assortment of sensors. However, designing and implementing high quality mobile apps can be a difficult process. This is primarily due to challenges unique to mobile development including change-prone APIs and platform fragmentation, just to name a few. in this dissertation we develop techniques that aid developers in overcoming these challenges by automating and improving current software design and testing practices for mobile apps. More specifically, we first introduce a technique, called Gvt, that improves the quality of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for mobile apps by automatically detecting instances where a GUI was not implemented to its intended specifications. Gvt does this by constructing hierarchal models of mobile GUIs from metadata associated with both graphical mock-ups (i.e., created by designers using photo-editing software) and running instances of the GUI from the corresponding implementation. Second, we develop an approach that completely automates prototyping of GUIs for mobile apps. This approach, called ReDraw, is able to transform an image of a mobile app GUI into runnable code by detecting discrete GUI-components using computer vision techniques, classifying these components into proper functional categories (e.g., button, dropdown menu) using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and assembling these components into realistic code. Finally, we design a novel approach for automated testing of mobile apps, called CrashScope, that explores a given android app using systematic input generation with the intrinsic goal of triggering crashes. The GUI-based input generation engine is driven by a combination of static and dynamic analyses that create a model of an app\u27s GUI and targets common, empirically derived root causes of crashes in android apps. We illustrate that the techniques presented in this dissertation represent significant advancements in mobile development processes through a series of empirical investigations, user studies, and industrial case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of these approaches and the benefit they provide developers