Evaluation of a Proposed Set of Usability Heuristics

The innovations proposed by the mobile phone market have grown steadily in recent years, along with the increasing complexity of the hardware, operating systems and applications available in this market. These changes bring new usability-related challenges that need to be considered during the application development process, as new forms of user-application interaction increasingly require behavioral adaptation. In this situation, usability is an important issue, which depends on usability factors such as the User, their characteristics and skills, the Task he intends to achieve and also the Context of Use in which the user and the application are inserted. The components of this set are detailed in a set of heuristics previous proposed that was evaluated through two heuristic evaluations, which allowed to incorporate improvements to the proposal. Furthermore, a set of 13 usability heuristics and 183 sub-heuristics were proposed, which, through heuristic evaluations, better results were evidenced. The proposal makes it easier for experts to find a greater number of usability problems, mostly of greater severity, compared to the proposal of Inostroza et al. As possible future work, further evaluations may be carried out to evaluate the proposal to include more experts in the field, as well as to use the set of heuristics in a larger number of applications of different categories

The impact of an integrated STEAM project delivered via mobile technology on the reasoning ability of elementary school students

The aim of this research is to describe the impact of implementing an integrated STEAM Project in mobile technology on the Mathematical Reasoning ability of elementary school students and to describe the process of designing an integrated STEAM Project and mobile application. A quantitative descriptive and quasi-experimental research design was employed, with data collection of test (pre-test and post-test), and Questionnaire A pre-test, and post-test was administered to determine the impact of the STEAM Project on students’ reasoning abilities. A sample of 130 fifth grade students, 70 female students, and 60 male students from different elementary schools in Meuraxa District, Aceh Province, Indonesia participated in the research. Results show that an empirical analysis of mobile technology is valid and feasible for use with fifth grade elementary school students. Prior to implementing the STEAM Project, the average pre-test of reasoning ability was 40.44 with a standard deviation of 10.27. After implementation, the average score improved to 84.01 with a standard deviation of 7.31. The results of a Paired Sample Correlation obtained a mathematical reasoning ability score before and after implementation of the STEAM Project of 0.452. The calculations in the N-GAIN test table for the implementation of the STEAM Project on Reasoning Ability found 76 students, or 58.46 %, in the high category, and 54 students, or 41.54%, in the medium category. The results of this study provide information, and recommendations for the development of learning models that could improve reasoning abilities. The project could be used as a reference template to accelerate the recovery of quality education during challenging times such as a pandemicPeer Reviewe

Ontology for SEAM Service Models

A service system is a popular concept in academia and industry. At the same time, it is a challenging concept to represent, due to its recursive nature and difficulty to relate it to entities in reality. In this paper we present an ontology for modeling service systems using the SEAM systemic method. Our ontology represents an updated and minimalistic version of the existing SEAM service modeling language that puts an emphasis on the behavior. The research approach we used is the design science for information systems research and it resulted with the ontology artifact. As part of the ontology, we provide a meta-model, well-formedness rules and formalization in the Alloy language. We conclude with presenting the limitations and a brief discussion on the contribution of shifting the focus towards the behavior in service systems

Assessing test artifact quality -- A tertiary study

Context: Modern software development increasingly relies on software testing for an ever more frequent delivery of high quality software. This puts high demands on the quality of the central artifacts in software testing, test suites and test cases. Objective: We aim to develop a comprehensive model for capturing the dimensions of test case/suite quality, which are relevant for a variety of perspectives. Method: We have carried out a systematic literature review to identify and analyze existing secondary studies on quality aspects of software testing artifacts. Results: We identified 49 relevant secondary studies. Of these 49 studies, less than half did some form of quality appraisal of the included primary studies and only 3 took into account the quality of the primary study when synthesizing the results. We present an aggregation of the context dimensions and factors that can be used to characterize the environment in which the test case/suite quality is investigated. We also provide a comprehensive model of test case/suite quality with definitions for the quality attributes and measurements based on findings in the literature and ISO/IEC 25010:2011. Conclusion: The test artifact quality model presented in the paper can be used to support test artifact quality assessment and improvement initiatives in practice. Furtherm Information and Software Technology 139 (2021): 106620ore, the model can also be used as a framework for documenting context characteristics to make research results more accessible for research and practice

Avaliação heurística em um contexto real

Trabalho de Conclusão de Curso (graduação)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Ciências Exatas, Departamento de Ciência da Computação, 2019.O aumento progressivo do uso da Internet nos últimos anos revela a crescente busca por informação. Com a necessidade de consumir informação, a popularidade de ferramentas de busca aumenta, a ponto de se tornar uma função primária no navegador ao digitarmos na barra de navegação. O volume de informação crescente amplia a demanda por refinamento de informação e enfatiza as preocupações acerca de como o conteúdo é apresentado e se a entrega de informação aos usuários é bem sucedida. Este trabalho apresenta uma avaliação de usabilidade em um sistema de busca de documentos oficiais do TCU, o Pesquisa textual | Tribunal de Contas da União. A necessidade de criar um padrão nos sistemas do TCU resultou na ideia de centralizar diferentes tipos de documentos em uma única ferramenta de busca. Aplicando a inspeção heurística proposta por Nielsen foi possível reunir erros que foram negligenciados no processo de desenvolvimento. Os resultados foram consideráveis: 49 falhas de usabilidade encontradas em um produto que já havia sido lançado. Taxas de severidade foram aplicadas no método de inspeção para categorizar os erros e ordenar a prioridade de suas resoluções. Ao resumir frequência, impacto e persistência a escalas, foi possível associar essas taxas para criar uma escala única de severidade, atribuindo um índice a cada erro. Este trabalho tornou possível a correção de várias falhas de usabilidade que estavam ocorrendo no sistema. Sendo o projeto amplo, a quantidade de falhas encontradas apesar de parecer um número grande, é proporcional à quantidade de páginas: aproximadamente um erro por página. Uma das limitações deste trabalho está relacionada à quantidade de especialistas na equipe de inspeção, embora estudos indiquem que um pequeno grupo de avaliadores é suficiente, especialmente quando o projeto apesar de ter muitas telas, reutiliza módulos e replica componentes. A contribuição é primeiramente interna à organização, por auxiliar na entrega de um produto melhor. Porém, o estudo utilizado neste trabalho permitiu a autora resumir os benefícios da inspeção heurística, apresentando resultados no contexto real, com números e categorização definidos.Network growing through recent years reveals our continuous need for information. With the urge of consuming information, search engine popularity rises, becoming our browser’s primary function when typing in the navigation bar. The increasing information volume amplifies the demands of search refining and emphasizes the concern about presenting data correctly and delivering answers to the users successfully. This work presents a usability evaluation in the Federal Court of Accounts search engine for official documents. The urge to create a pattern in TCU systems brought the idea of centralizing different types of doc- uments in only one search engine. Applying the inspection methods proposed by Nielsen, it was possible to gather issues that were neglected in development process. The results were outstanding: 49 issues found in a product that had already been released. Severity ratings were applied in the presented inspection method, in order to categorize the issues and sort their solutions priority. By summarizing their frequency, impact and persistence to rates, it was possible to combine those rates in a single severity index, assigned to each issue. This work made possible to define the corrections of several usability errors occurring in the system. Being a wide project, the amount of issues found though seemed a large number, are proportionally not so heavy: approximately one issue per screen is an acceptable result. The limitations of the studies where the amount of specialists involved, although the results indicates that a small group of evaluators is sufficient, specially when the project despite having many screens, has a lot of replicate components, where screens are not the same, but reuses interfaces modules. The contribution is primarily internal, by assisting in the deliver of a better product. But the study and reports used in this work allowed the author to summarize the benefits of the heuristic inspection method, presenting the results in real context, with explicit numbers and categorizing

Designing, Aligning, and Visualizing Service Systems

Service is a concept that separates the concerns of an organization into (1) the value created for users and (2) the way the organization manages its resources to provide this value. The discipline of management of information technology (IT) uses services to coordinate and to optimize the use of IT resources (servers, applications, databases, etc.) in a way that brings value to users. The concrete application of the service concept is challenging due to its abstract, interdependent and recursive nature. We experienced this challenge while collaborating with the IT department of our university (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL) when the IT department adopted the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) best-practices framework for IT service management. As researchers, we have the goal of improving the understanding of services as a means to structuring what people and organizations do. In the context of the IT department, we studied how to apply the service concept internally within the IT department, and externally (as business services) in the overall organization. In this thesis, we model services by using systems thinking principles. In particular, we use and improve SEAM, the systemic service-modeling method developed in our laboratory. Our main result is an ontology for SEAM service modeling. Our contributions are the heuristics that define how the ontology relates to a perceived reality: for example, the heuristics focus on behavior rather than organization and they put an emphasis on service instances rather than service types. We also define alignment between service systems, based on the properties of the systems¿ behavior. We show how to model an organization by implementing the concept of service as defined by our ontology. This ontology supports the design of service systems that align across both IT and business services. During our work with over one hundred IT services, we developed several visualization prototypes of a service cartography; we use these prototypes to describe and to relate the different views required for managing services. Our results offer a concrete way to implement the abstract concept of services. This way could be of interest for any organization willing to embark on a large-scale service project

An internal audit expectation gap: South African Revenue Services project audit engagements

South African Revenue Services (SARS) was established as a quasi-government organisation with a mandate to efficiently and effectively collect revenue based on the export, import, movement, manufacture and storage of specific goods. Information Technology (IT) governance is strategically important to SARS in that its business processes are technology driven and that technology projects are implemented to support the SARS strategic objectives. In alignment to the King code for corporate governance and ethical business practices, an Internal Audit Function (IAF) as a regulatory requirement of all public sector entities in South Africa exists at SARS. The aim of the research was to evaluate the perspectives of SARS stakeholders regarding the organisation’s IT project auditing process. The study focused on gathering data from various SARS stakeholders involved in the delivery of IT projects and IT projects auditing. Through a qualitative research approach, interviews were conducted with practitioners such as Internal Auditors, Internal Audit managers, and executives as well as project managers and ownersso asto obtain a holistic understanding of stakeholder expectations of an IT project audit. An analysis of the data collected led to the deduction of recommendations meant to enhance stakeholder perceptions of the IT audit function within SARS. The study found that there is a perceived value derived from IA reviews of IT projects. The findings also revealed that rather than lack of resources and expertise, skill set deficiencies were the major setback in achieving IA goals. The findings further revealed that there are deficiencies in the quality of IA reports. Some of the main recommendations were to expand the scope of the Internal Audit roles, intensify engagements of Internal Audits by the Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO), improve the quality of reports, and capacitate Internal Auditors with reporting skills. This study presents a modest contribution that is expected to enrich knowledge on how to audit IT projects. Moreover, the study contributes towards a methodological position of design science by producing results from a smaller sample augmented by interview results in an environment characterised by smaller populations so that inferences can be made