Abstract

Over the years the software engineering community has increasingly realized the important role software architecture plays in fulfilling the quality requirements of a system. The quality attributes of a software system are, to a large extent determined by the system’s software architecture. Usability is an essential part of software quality. The usability of software has traditionally been evaluated on completed systems. Evaluating usability at completion introduces a great risk of wasting effort on software products that are not usable. A scenario based assessment approach has proven to be successful for assessing quality attributes such as modifiability and maintainability. It is our conjecture that scenario-based assessment can also be applied for usability assessment. This paper presents and describes a scenario-based assessment method to evaluate whether a given software architecture (provided usability) meets the usability requirements (required usability). The Scenario-based Architecture Level Usabili Ty? Assessment (SALUTA) method consists of five main steps, goal selection, usage profile creation, software architecture description, scenario evaluation and interpretation.

-- Daniel Amyot - 05 Jul 2010

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