Adoption-centric usability engineering: systematic deployment, evaluation and improvement of usability engineering methods in the software engineering lifecycle

Developing software systems which are easy to use and increase the productivity of users is still a major challenge in software engineering. Thus a large number of usability engineering methods have been proposed to systematically develop software with high usability. However studies indicate that even basic usability engineering methods are not integrated in software development lifecycles practiced in industrial settings. Research is required into the barriers of uptake of usability engineering methods within technically driven engineering disciplines. Yet problems in the adoption of methods by project teams are rarely examined. This work provides a new perspective on the problem of the uptake of usability engineering methods by software development teams. The adoption of methods by project teams contrary to common beliefs is not assured just because it is mandated by the organization. This work argues that usability engineering methods can only be regarded as integrated in the software development process of an organization, when these methods are practiced and accepted by development teams. So far no frameworks for examining the acceptance of methods by project teams and for exploiting such data for guiding project teams in method deployment are available. To address this problem this work presents an approach which consists of a process meta-model for guiding project teams in the deployment of usability engineering methods and a measurement framework for measuring the acceptance of the deployed methods. The approach is called adoption-centric usability engineering. The approach provides a concept to capture usability engineering methods together with a context profile. The context profile encodes the factors which contributed to the acceptance or rejection of the respective methods in past projects. This context-sensitive description of a usability engineering method introduced in this work is called a USEPack (Usability Engineering Experience Package). For guiding project teams in integrating usability engineering methods into their development processes the approach developed in this work introduces the concept of a usability engineering method kit. A usability engineering method kit is an abstraction of a usability engineering methodology which separates process phases and activities from the specific methods to perform them. The assignment of methods to certain activities is not predefined. They are chosen to best fit the characteristics of a project at hand. Usability engineering methods are linked to a usability engineering method kit in the form of USEPacks. The linking of USEPacks to a method kit is based on the characteristics of the project in which the method kit is to be deployed and on the acceptance rating which the USEPacks received in previous projects. To measure the acceptance of each USEPack after deployment, the approach proposes to use existing theories of technology acceptance. Based on these theories the perceived usefulness and ease of use of each USEPack deployed in a project is assessed by the project team to measure the acceptance of the USEPack. The approach provides concepts which exploit the collected data to adapt the context profiles of the deployed USEPacks. After a number of iterations the context profiles of USEPacks reflect the factors which contributed to the acceptance or rejection of a USEPack by project teams. This knowledge can be used in future projects to guide the selection of appropriate methods and to improve the acceptance of usability engineering methods by project teams. The concepts of the adoption-centric usability engineering approach are implemented in a support system which aims at supporting the introduction, evaluation and improvement of usability engineering methods in software development organizations. The system is called ProUSE. The main components of the system allow project teams to configure project specific method kits, assess the acceptance of the deployed USEPacks as well as to build and maintain the pool of USEPacks. ProUSE fuses and exploits the data gathered in the acceptance assessments to optimize the project specific selection of appropriate usability engineering methods. In this work an evaluation of the developed framework with potential users of the adoption-centric usability engineering approach is performed. 44 project team members of five software development organizations participated in the evaluation. The evaluation shows that project team members understand the objectives of the approach and can transfer the concepts to their processes. Moreover the evaluation shows that the approach as it is embodied in the support environment ProUSE is perceived as useful and easy to use by project teams. The evaluation indicates that the adoption-centric usability engineering approach has the potential to improve the introduction and establishment of usability engineering methods in software development processes.