Current Practices for Product Usability Testing in Web and Mobile Applications

Software usability testing is a key methodology that ensures applications are intuitive and easy to use for the target audience. Usability testing has direct benefits for companies as usability improvements often are fundamental to the success of a product. A standard usability test study includes the following five steps: obtain suitable participants, design test scripts, conduct usability sessions, interpret test outcomes, and produce recommendations. Due to the increasing importance for more usable applications, effective techniques to develop usable products, as well as technologies to improve usability testing, have been widely utilized. However, as companies are developing more cross-platform web and mobile apps, traditional single-platform usability testing has shortcomings with respect to ensuring a uniform user experience. In this report, a new strategy is proposed to promote a consistent user experience across all application versions and platforms. This method integrates the testing of different application versions, e.g., the website, mobile app, mobile website. Participants are recruited with a better-defined criterion according to their preferred devices. The usability session is conducted iteratively on several different devices, and the test results of individual application versions are compared on a per-device basis to improve the test outcomes. This strategy is expected to extend on current practices for usability testing by incorporating cross-platform consistency of software versions on most devices

Adaptive Process Management in Cyber-Physical Domains

The increasing application of process-oriented approaches in new challenging cyber-physical domains beyond business computing (e.g., personalized healthcare, emergency management, factories of the future, home automation, etc.) has led to reconsider the level of flexibility and support required to manage complex processes in such domains. A cyber-physical domain is characterized by the presence of a cyber-physical system coordinating heterogeneous ICT components (PCs, smartphones, sensors, actuators) and involving real world entities (humans, machines, agents, robots, etc.) that perform complex tasks in the “physical” real world to achieve a common goal. The physical world, however, is not entirely predictable, and processes enacted in cyber-physical domains must be robust to unexpected conditions and adaptable to unanticipated exceptions. This demands a more flexible approach in process design and enactment, recognizing that in real-world environments it is not adequate to assume that all possible recovery activities can be predefined for dealing with the exceptions that can ensue. In this chapter, we tackle the above issue and we propose a general approach, a concrete framework and a process management system implementation, called SmartPM, for automatically adapting processes enacted in cyber-physical domains in case of unanticipated exceptions and exogenous events. The adaptation mechanism provided by SmartPM is based on declarative task specifications, execution monitoring for detecting failures and context changes at run-time, and automated planning techniques to self-repair the running process, without requiring to predefine any specific adaptation policy or exception handler at design-time

Combining edge and cloud computing for mobility analytics

Mobility analytics using data generated from the Internet of Mobile Things (IoMT) is facing many challenges which range from the ingestion of data streams coming from a vast number of fog nodes and IoMT devices to avoiding overflowing the cloud with useless massive data streams that can trigger bottlenecks [1]. Managing data flow is becoming an important part of the IoMT because it will dictate in which platform analytical tasks should run in the future. Data flows are usually a sequence of out-of-order tuples with a high data input rate, and mobility analytics requires a real-time flow of data in both directions, from the edge to the cloud, and vice-versa. Before pulling the data streams to the cloud, edge data stream processing is needed for detecting missing, broken, and duplicated tuples in addition to recognize tuples whose arrival time is out of order. Analytical tasks such as data filtering, data cleaning and low-level data contextualization can be executed at the edge of a network. In contrast, more complex analytical tasks such as graph processing can be deployed in the cloud, and the results of ad-hoc queries and streaming graph analytics can be pushed to the edge as needed by a user application. Graphs are efficient representations used in mobility analytics because they unify knowledge about connectivity, proximity and interaction among moving things. This poster describes the preliminary results from our experimental prototype developed for supporting transit systems, in which edge and cloud computing are combined to process transit data streams forwarded from fog nodes into a cloud. The motivation of this research is to understand how to perform meaningfulness mobility analytics on transit feeds by combining cloud and fog computing architectures in order to improve fleet management, mass transit and remote asset monitoringComment: Edge Computing, Cloud Computing, Mobility Analytics, Internet of Mobile Things, Edge Fog Fabri

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers