=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-490/paper-9
|storemode=property
|title=Is Usability Getting Unpopular?
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-490/paper_09.pdf
|volume=Vol-490
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/iused/LarusdottirHM09
}}
==Is Usability Getting Unpopular?==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-490/paper_09.pdf
User Involvement in Icelandic Software Industry
Marta Kristin Larusdottir Olöf Una Haraldsdottir Bright Agnar Mikkelsen
Reykjavik University Reykjavik University Reykjavik University
Kringlan 1 Kringlan 1 Kringlan 1
103 Reykjavik, Iceland 103 Reykjavik, Iceland 103 Reykjavik, Iceland
+354-599 6200 +354-599 6200 +354-599 6200
marta@ru.is olofh06@ru.is brigt06@ru.is
ABSTRACT usability needs, for example in [8].
This paper reports the first results from a recent study done on In this paper the following research questions are analyzed:
user involvement in Icelandic software industry. A questionnaire
• What software processes are used in the Icelandic
survey was made to gather information on the software processes
software industry today?
used and to what extent user involvement methods are used by
software developers in the different processes. • How do software developers rate the importance of
usability? Is there some variance according to the
The results show that the majority of the respondents use their
process used?
own process where they have adjusted their development process
to their needs. More than one third of the respondents use the • Which methods do software developers use to involve
agile process Scrum. That group is the most skeptical one when users in the software development? Is there some
rating the importance of usability in software development. variance according to the process used?
Meetings are the most popular method for involving users.
2. MATERIALS AND METHOD
Categories and Subject Descriptors An online questionnaire was created in the QuestionPro tool for
H.5.2[User Interfaces] User-centered design, Theory and gathering data on the research questions. The target respondents
methods. were software developers in Iceland. There are not that many
specialists in Human-Computer Interaction in Iceland so the
Keywords software developers are the ones that contact users during the
Software processes, User involvement methods, User centered software development and they should have had one or two
software development. course in their education for learning methods to involve users.
The survey was sent out to two mailing lists, one containing 100
1. INTRODUCTION members called the Agile-group and the other containing
A numbers of studies have been done in different countries to approximately 100 women in information technology (IT-
gather information on how practitioners use methods for women). The survey was also posted on Facebook within a group
involving users in the software development, e. g. [1, 2, 4, 5, 7, of the Computer Scientists Association containing 256 members.
9]. When the results from these studies are compared, it can be It is possible that the mailing lists and the group overlap and
seen that the emphasis in one country can differ to some extent to therefore we estimate that the survey reached approximately 300
the emphasis in another country regarding user involvement target respondents.
methods used and how the respondents rate the methods. A study According to the Federation of Icelandic Industries [3] there were
like this has not been done in Iceland so far. 2.071 jobs in the Icelandic Software Industry in the year 2004. It
is hard to say what the number is now because between 2004 and
The agile software development process has been growing in
2008 there was a big growth in the field but in October 2008 the
popularity in Iceland for the last five years or so, where the Scrum
financial crisis changed the picture a lot. Still the software
process has been the most popular one. In Scrum the projects are
industry has not been as much affected as other industries, so we
split up in two to four weeks long iterations called sprints, each
estimate that there were around 2.000 employees working in the
ending up with a potential shippable product. Scrum heavily
software industry at the time of the survey.
emphasizes on self organizing and well compounded teams,
The number of respondents was 82 so we estimate that around
typically with 6 – 8 interdisciplinary team members [6].
25% of the people contacted did respond. The majority of the
Traditional Scrum has been criticized for not involving users in
respondents 93% had B. Sc. degree or M. Sc. Degree in either
their software process and for not adequately address their
Computer Science or Engineering. More than half of the
respondents or 54% had 10 years experience or more in the
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for
software industry. More than half of the respondents 56% were
personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are
not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that male and 44% women. According to the Federation of Icelandic
copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy Industries [3], 24% of the employees in software industry in
otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, Iceland were women in 2004, so our sample is biased towards
requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. women.
Interact 2009, August 24–28, 2009, Uppsala, Sweden. Right now we are analyzing the data, so this paper describes the
Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0004…$5.00. first results from the survey.
3. RESULTS Table 1: The User Involvement Methods used in each
In the following answers to the three research questions will be software development process
described.
3.1 The software processes used
When asked about the process that the developers use for software
development, 44% of the respondents say that they use their own
process, where they have probably adjusted some known process
to their needs. Furthermore 37% use Scrum, which has grown in
popularity the last five years or so in Iceland. The remaining 19%
use other processes, including for example the Waterfall process
and Extreme programming.
3.2 The importance of usability
When asked to rate the importance of usability the definition of
usability was first described to them in the following way:
“Usability is a qualitative attribute that assesses how easy user 4. CONCLUSIONS
interfaces are to use. Usability is mainly made up of three factors: One third of the Icelandic developers use the Scrum process and
Effectiveness – Can the users solve their tasks with the software? that group does not rate usability as highly as developers using
Efficiency – Can the user solve their tasks without major other processes. We do not have any results explaining this yet,
problems? Satisfaction – How satisfied are the users?” The but this is really worth looking at in future work. When looking at
respondents were asked to answer if they agreed or disagreed to what user involvement methods are used in each development
the statement that usability is important for the success of the process this trend is not that obvious. The surprising result there is
software. The developers that used Scrum were the most that the most popular method is meetings with users even though
skeptical, as can be seen on Figure 1. Twelve percent of the that has not been taught in any text books on user involvement.
respondents that use the Scrum process answer that usability is
neither important nor unimportant. Sixty one (61%) said they
strongly agree, but 72% of those that use their own process said 5. REFERENCES
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