Characterization of Software Projects by Restructuring Parameters for Usability Evaluation

Abstract

Every software project progresses through a development process with necessary involvement of developers and users both. For evaluation of the software to confirm its phase wise goals, objectives and quality, developers and customers must reach to a win-win condition. It has been observed that the user satisfaction is the most important factor that must be emphasized in software development and thus, usability is an indispensable feature of a software project. Inclusion of usability dictates determination of existence of usability at different stages of development for measurement of user performance and user satisfaction. Various criteria known as software parameters are employed to evaluate the software for realizing certain level of usability. These criteria may be applied for software estimations and are also involved in several assessments during software development process. Variety of well defined and well structured parameters such as size, duration, files used, external inputs, external outputs, external queries etc. are available to support development of desirable software. Further, based upon these parameters other important software estimations may be derived. Though there exist various dimensions of employing the parameters based on the requirements of a software project, these parameters must be redefined and restructured to evaluate usability of software to produce usable software. In this paper, we restructure the software project parameters for evaluation of software usability. It will lead to overall characterization of the projects in usability perspective. Also, it will be useful for ranking usability attributes and measuring usability subsequently.