scholarly journals Integrating User eXperience practices into software development processes: implications of the UX characteristics

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. e130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pariya Kashfi ◽  
Agneta Nilsson ◽  
Robert Feldt

User eXperience (UX) is a key factor in the success of software systems. Many software companies face challenges in their work with UX. Existing research does not analyze UX practices and challenges in relation to other software quality characteristics or, in particular, in relation to usability. A better understanding of these challenges can help researchers and practitioners better address them in the future. In this empirical study, we have interviewed 17 practitioners with different backgrounds and occupations from eight software development companies. Their responses are coded, and analyzed with thematic analysis. We report eight themes of challenges that practitioners face in their work with UX. While some of these challenges partly overlap with those reported in existing literature about usability or other software quality characteristics, the participants of our study either view many of the challenges as unique to UX, or more severe in the case of UX. Although at a superficial level challenges of UX and other quality characteristics overlap, we differentiate these challenges at a deeper level through the five main characteristics of UX:subjective,holistic,dynamic,context-dependentandworthwhile. In particular, we identified that these characteristics have at least 20 implications (i.e. additional difficulties) for day-to-day work of practitioners. We found that 11 of these implications have been previously reported in literature. However, to the best of our knowledge, the remaining nine implications are unique to our study. These implications can explain why practitioners perceive the challenges to be more severe than for other quality characteristics. Most importantly, they can explain the industry’s lopsided focus on the pragmatic aspect of UX. Our findings can be useful for researchers in identifying new and industry-relevant research areas and for practitioners to learn from empirically investigated challenges in UX work, and base their improvement efforts on such knowledge. Identifying and investigating the overlaps underlines the importance of these challenges, and can also help finding research areas not only for enhancing UX work but also software quality in general. It also makes it easier for practitioners to spot, better understand as well as find mitigation strategies for UX, through learning from past experiences and developments in the area of software quality.

Author(s):  
Saqib Saeed ◽  
Farrukh Masood Khawaja ◽  
Zaigham Mahmood

Pervasive systems and increased reliance on embedded systems require that the underlying software is properly tested and has in-built high quality. The approaches often adopted to realize software systems have inherent weaknesses that have resulted in less robust software applications. The requirement of reliable software suggests that quality needs to be instilled at all stages of a software development paradigms, especially at the testing stages of the development cycle ensuring that quality attributes and parameters are taken into account when designing and developing software. In this respect, numerous tools, techniques, and methodologies have also been proposed. In this chapter, the authors present and review different methodologies employed to improve the software quality during the software development lifecycle.


Author(s):  
J. Rech

Software quality assurance is concerned with the efficient and effective development of large, reliable, and high-quality software systems. In agile software development and maintenance, refactoring is an important phase for the continuous improvement of a software system by removing quality defects like code smells. As time is a crucial factor in agile development, not all quality defects can be removed in one refactoring phase (especially in one iteration). Documentation of quality defects that are found during automated or manual discovery activities (e.g., pair programming) is necessary to avoid wasting time by rediscovering them in later phases. Unfortunately, the documentation and handling of existing quality defects and refactoring activities is a common problem in software maintenance. To recall the rationales why changes were carried out, information has to be extracted from either proprietary documentations or software versioning systems. In this chapter, we describe a process for the recurring and sustainable discovery, handling, and treatment of quality defects in software systems. An annotation language is presented that is used to store information about quality defects found in source code and that represents the defect and treatment history of a part of a software system. The process and annotation language can not only be used to support quality defect discovery processes, but is also applicable in testing and inspection processes.


Author(s):  
Syed Zahoor Hassan

A number of software quality enhancement approaches have been suggested and implemented. Over the last decade, software (SW) companies in developed countries have reported significant enhancements in productivity and quality by using various quality approaches. Software companies operating in developing countries have also undertaken quality initiatives in the recent years. This chapter presents a framework for analysis of quality initiatives. The need for considering customer and market aspects in assessing an organization’s quality initiatives has been established. The notion of a market quality indicator (MQI) has been introduced for this purpose. Information on the quality and process improvement initiatives at some of the leading software companies of Pakistan has been collected. The proposed framework is applied to analyze the quality initiatives of these companies. Based on the insights obtained from this analysis, some recommendations for companies interested in launching quality and process improvement initiatives are also presented.


2022 ◽  
pp. 1416-1443
Author(s):  
Gloria Arcos-Medina ◽  
David Mauricio

Agile practices are activities or procedures that are applied during the software development process in order to improve its quality and productivity. The objective of this study is to determine the influence of agile practices on software quality. For this purpose, a model composed of 4 groups of agile practices and 8 quality characteristics according to the ISO/IEC 25010 standard has here been proposed. The results of 146 questionnaires addressed to people involved in the software development process show that the application of agile engineering and project management practices have a significant positive influence on the quality attribute functionality. On the other hand, project management practices have a low impact on the quality characteristics of compatibility, portability, security, and usability.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2.28) ◽  
pp. 344
Author(s):  
Krishna Chaya Addagarrala ◽  
Patrick Kinnicutt

Safety critical software development field is one of the active research areas in many industries like automotive, medical, railways, nuclear and aerospace are placing increased value on safety and reliability. Safety critical software systems are those systems whose failure could result in the death or a serious injury to the people’s life, security is one of the important topics in the field of safety-critical systems and it must be addressed completely in order to operate safety critical software successfully. In this paper we present a study about the set of standards and different ground rules to be followed in critical software development practices in different industries and the challenges in applying these standards. We also discuss the role of static analysis and software integrity levels in these standards, similarities in these standards and the set of activities followed in the development process of these standards. 


2009 ◽  
pp. 242-265
Author(s):  
Jörg Rech

Software quality assurance is concerned with the efficient and effective development of large, reliable, and high-quality software systems. In agile software development and maintenance, refactoring is an important phase for the continuous improvement of a software system by removing quality defects like code smells. As time is a crucial factor in agile development, not all quality defects can be removed in one refactoring phase (especially in one iteration). Documentation of quality defects that are found during automated or manual discovery activities (e.g., pair programming) is necessary to avoid wasting time by rediscovering them in later phases. Unfortunately, the documentation and handling of existing quality defects and refactoring activities is a common problem in software maintenance. To recall the rationales why changes were carried out, information has to be extracted from either proprietary documentations or software versioning systems. In this chapter, we describe a process for the recurring and sustainable discovery, handling, and treatment of quality defects in software systems. An annotation language is presented that is used to store information about quality defects found in source code and that represents the defect and treatment history of a part of a software system. The process and annotation language can not only be used to support quality defect discovery processes, but is also applicable in testing and inspection processes.


Author(s):  
Gloria Arcos-Medina ◽  
David Mauricio

Agile practices are activities or procedures that are applied during the software development process in order to improve its quality and productivity. The objective of this study is to determine the influence of agile practices on software quality. For this purpose, a model composed of 4 groups of agile practices and 8 quality characteristics according to the ISO/IEC 25010 standard has here been proposed. The results of 146 questionnaires addressed to people involved in the software development process show that the application of agile engineering and project management practices have a significant positive influence on the quality attribute functionality. On the other hand, project management practices have a low impact on the quality characteristics of compatibility, portability, security, and usability.


Author(s):  
Saqib Saeed ◽  
Farrukh Masood Khawaja ◽  
Zaigham Mahmood

Pervasive systems and increased reliance on embedded systems require that the underlying software is properly tested and has in-built high quality. The approaches often adopted to realize software systems have inherent weaknesses that have resulted in less robust software applications. The requirement of reliable software suggests that quality needs to be instilled at all stages of a software development paradigms, especially at the testing stages of the development cycle ensuring that quality attributes and parameters are taken into account when designing and developing software. In this respect, numerous tools, techniques, and methodologies have also been proposed. In this chapter, the authors present and review different methodologies employed to improve the software quality during the software development lifecycle.


Author(s):  
Rory V. O'Connor ◽  
Shuib Basri

Software and systems engineering is distinct from other forms of engineering as it deals with an intangible product, where the progress in construction is not explicitly visible and team members often rely on the documentation of others to follow and review progress. Furthermore unlike traditional engineering disciplines, there is no single standardized unified process. The role of knowledge management in the software engineering literature is becoming more evident, as the software development activity is essentially a human knowledge intensive activity and is seen by many as a key factor. This paper discusses the role of software development knowledge management within software development process and specifically how software development knowledge is managed in software development in order to support software process improvement and the role of knowledge management in this. The authors present the results of a study of knowledge management process practices in very small software companies and discusses these under the major identified issues of: Communication; Learning and sharing; Documentation and Knowledge management process and commitment. The findings in this study give an insight towards knowledge management practices as they relate to software development process practices in very small companies and the important factors that must be considered to preserve knowledge and quality software.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (8) ◽  
pp. 4400
Author(s):  
Zhao Zhai ◽  
Ming Shan ◽  
Amos Darko ◽  
Albert P. C. Chan

Corruption has been identified as a major problem in construction projects. It can jeopardize the success of these projects. Consequently, corruption has garnered significant attention in the construction industry over the past two decades, and several studies on corruption in construction projects (CICP) have been conducted. Previous efforts to analyze and review this body of knowledge have been manual, qualitative and subjective, thus prone to bias and limited in the number of reviewed studies. There remains a lack of inclusive, quantitative, objective and computational analysis of global CICP research to inform future research, policy and practice. This study aims to address this lack by providing the first inclusive bibliometric study exploring the state-of-the-art of global CICP research. To this end, a quantitative and objective technique aided by CiteSpace was used to systematically and computationally analyze a large corpus of 542 studies retrieved from the Web of Science and published from 2000 to 2020. The findings revealed major and influential CICP research journals, persons, institutions, countries, references and areas of focus, as well as revealing how these interact with each other in research networks. This study contributes to the in-depth understanding of global research on CICP. By highlighting the principal research areas, gaps, emerging trends and directions, as well as patterns in CICP research, the findings could help researchers, practitioners and policy makers position their future CICP research and/or mitigation strategies.


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