Ontology-driven and template-based approach for usability requirements elicitation and specification
Nowadays, due to the high demand for quality software, the challenges facing by developers to meet the user expectations are increased from time to time. Usability, a quality attribute related to efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction of the end users to a system has been recognized as one of...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2018
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/83756/1/FSKTM%202018%2086%20-ir.pdf |
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| Summary: | Nowadays, due to the high demand for quality software, the challenges facing
by developers to meet the user expectations are increased from time to time.
Usability, a quality attribute related to efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction
of the end users to a system has been recognized as one of the significant
factors that can influence user preferences and acceptance of software
products. However, due to its abstract in characteristic and most of the
software developers are lack of sufficient knowledge or expertise about
usability issues, usability requirements are always being neglected especially
from the early stage of software development. Typically, usability requirements
are being specified at the later stage, such as during design, implementation or
evaluation. The improper treatment of usability issues always cause the poor
quality in software products and can contribute largely to software failure. As a
result, it increases the efforts and costs of resolving usability problems after the
software implementation and deployment. Therefore, an essential approach for
considering and incorporating usability requirements start from the early stage
of software development especially during the requirements elicitation became
tremendously important. This study attempts to address the issues in improper
treatment of usability by proposing a conceptual framework known as Usability
Requirements Elicitation and Specification (UReS). The UReS is an ontologydriven
and template-based approach mainly used for usability requirements
elicitation and specification during the requirements engineering (RE) activities.
UReS aims to provide semantic guidance to facilitate the requirement engineer
in eliciting the relevant usability features of a domain’s function and specifying
the usability requirements. To ensure the sufficient knowledge on usability is
provided, a domain ontology which encodes the knowledge about usability
features that are relevant to a domain context is designed and acts as the
knowledge model in UReS framework during the requirements elicitation
activity. Meanwhile, to foster the consistency and clarity of requirements specification, UReS uses a set of predefined boilerplate template to support the
process of usability requirements specification. Apart from that, an UReS
prototype tool has been developed to support the automation of UReS
conceptual framework for facilitating the requirement engineer in performing
the requirements elicitation and specification tasks. Furthermore, UReS
conceptual framework and the prototype tool are validated using controlled
experiment and usability study. The results achieved from the controlled
experiment shows that the treatment approach, UReS framework performed
well compared to control approach, the manual usability guidelines in terms of
the accuracy which measured by correctness and completeness and the
number of consistent and unambiguous usability requirements specification
generated. In addition, the usability study used to evaluate the user perceptions
in terms of the usefulness and usability of UReS prototype tool has received
positive feedbacks from the targeted respondents. |
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