BioMet®Tools: from modeling and simulation to product design and development

BioMet®Tools is a set of software applications developed for the biometrical characterization of voice in different fields as voice quality evaluation in laryngology, speech therapy and rehabilitation, education of the singing voice, forensic voice analysis in court, emotional detection in voice, secure access to facilities and services, etc. Initially it was conceived as plain research code to estimate the glottal source from voice and obtain the biomechanical parameters of the vocal folds from the spectral density of the estimate. This code grew to what is now the Glottex®Engine package (G®E). Further demands from users in medical and forensic fields instantiated the development of different Graphic User Interfaces (GUI’s) to encapsulate user interaction with the G®E. This required the personalized design of different GUI’s handling the same G®E. In this way development costs and time could be saved. The development model is described in detail leading to commercial production and distribution. Study cases from its application to the field of laryngology and speech therapy are given and discussed.

The usefulness of Usability and User Experience evaluation methods on an e-Learning platform development from a developer's perspective: A case study

The development of a web platform is a complex and interdisciplinary task, where people with different roles such as project manager, designer or developer participate. Different usability and User Experience evaluation methods can be used in each stage of the development life cycle, but not all of them have the same influence in the software development and in the final product or system. This article presents the study of the impact of these methods applied in the context of an e-Learning platform development. The results show that the impact has been strong from a developer's perspective. Developer team members considered that usability and User Experience evaluation allowed them mainly to identify design mistakes, improve the platform's usability and understand the end users and their needs in a better way. Interviews with potential users, clickmaps and scrollmaps were rated as the most useful methods. Finally, these methods were considered unanimously very useful in the context of the entire software development, only comparable to SCRUM meetings and overcoming the rest of involved factors.

Usability-Oriented Software Development Process

Usability is the capability of the software product to be understood, learned, used and attractive to the user, when used under specified conditions. Many studies demonstrate the benefits of usability, yet to this day software products continue to exhibit consistently low levels of this quality attribute. Furthermore, poor usability in software systems contributes largely to software failing in actual use. One of the main disciplines involved in usability is that of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Over the past two decades the HCI community has proposed specific features that should be present in applications to improve their usability, yet incorporating them into software continues to be far from trivial for software developers. These difficulties are due to multiple factors, including the high level of abstraction at which these HCI recommendations are made and how far removed they are from actual software implementation. In order to bridge this gap, the Software Engineering community has long proposed software design solutions to help developers include usability features into software, however, the problem remains an open research question. This doctoral thesis addresses the problem of helping software developers include specific usability features into their applications by providing them with a structured and tangible guidance in the form of a process, which we have termed the Usability-Oriented Software Development Process. This process is supported by a set of Software Usability Guidelines that help developers to incorporate a set of eleven usability features with high impact on software design. After developing the Usability-oriented Software Development Process and the Software Usability Guidelines, they have been validated across multiple academic projects and proven to help software developers to include such usability features into their software applications. In doing so, their use significantly reduced development time and improved the quality of the resulting designs of these projects. Furthermore, in this work we propose a software tool to automate the application of the proposed process. In sum, this work contributes to the integration of the Software Engineering and HCI disciplines providing a framework that helps software developers to create usable applications in an efficient way.

Tailoring the Scrum Development Process to Address Agile Product Line Engineering

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is becoming widely used due to the improvement it means when developing software products of the same family. However, SPLE demands long-term investment on a product-line platform that might not be profitable due to rapid changing business settings. Since Agile Software Development (ASD) approaches are being successfully applied in volatile markets, several companies have suggested the idea of integrating SPLE and ASD when a family product has to be developed. Agile Product Line Engineering (APLE) advocates the integration of SPLE and ASD to address their lacks when they are individually applied to software development. A previous literature re-view of experiences and practices on APLE revealed important challenges about how to fully put APLE into practice. Our contribution address several of these challenges by tailoring the agile method Scrum by means of three concepts that we have defined: plastic partial components, working PL-architectures, and reactive reuse.

End-User Development Success Factors and their Application to Composite Web Development Environments

The Future Internet is expected to be composed of a mesh of interoperable Web services accessed from all over the Web. This approach has not yet caught on since global user-service interaction is still an open issue. Successful composite applications rely on heavyweight service orchestration technologies that raise the bar far above end-user skills. The weakness lies in the abstraction of the underlying service front-end architecture rather than the infrastructure technologies themselves. In our opinion, the best approach is to offer end-to-end composition from user interface to service invocation, as well as an understandable abstraction of both building blocks and a visual composition technique. In this paper we formalize our vision with regard to the next-generation front-end Web technology that will enable integrated access to services, contents and things in the Future Internet. We present a novel reference architecture designed to empower non-technical end users to create and share their own self-service composite applications. A tool implementing this architecture has been developed as part of the European FP7 FAST Project and EzWeb Project, allowing us to validate the rationale behind our approach.

Supporting End-User Development through a New Composition Model: An Empirical Study

End-user development (EUD) is much hyped, and its impact has outstripped even the most optimistic forecasts. Even so, the vision of end users programming their own solutions has not yet materialized. This will continue to be so unless we in both industry and the research community set ourselves the ambitious challenge of devising end to end an end-user application development model for developing a new age of EUD tools. We have embarked on this venture, and this paper presents the main insights and outcomes of our research and development efforts as part of a number of successful EU research projects. Our proposal not only aims to reshape software engineering to meet the needs of EUD but also to refashion its components as solution building blocks instead of programs and software developments. This way, end users will really be empowered to build solutions based on artefacts akin to their expertise and understanding of ideal solutions

Development of a Model for Security and Usability

This research addressed the development of a consolidated model designed especially to cover the security and usability attributes of a software product. As a starting point, we built a new usability model on the basis of well-known quality standards and models. We then used an existing security model to analyse the relationship between these two approaches. This analysis consisted of a systematic mapping study of the relationship between security and usability as global quality factors. We identified five relationship types: inverse, direct, relative, one-way inverse, and no relationship. Most authors agree that there is an inverse relationship between security and usability. However, this is not a unanimous finding, and this study unveils a number of open questions, like application domain dependency and the need to explore lower-level relationships between attribute subcharacteristics. In order to clarify the questions raised during the research, we conducted a second systematic mapping to further analyse the finer-grained structure of these factors, such as authentication as a subset of security and user efficiency as a subset of usability. The most relevant finding is that efficiency does not depend on the security level during the authentication process. There are other subfactors that require analysis. Accordingly, this research is the first part of a larger project to develop a full-blown consolidated model for security and usability.

Evaluation of Development Projects: a Process-Centered Approach in the Outskirts of Lima, Peru.

Development cooperation projects work with people involved in processes of change and social transformation. While the main objective of the intervention is the development process itself, the project?s quality will be determined by the way of implementing it. Its success lies in the sustainability of the generated processes and the connection with them by the involved actors. The evaluation analyses both aspects. This article examines the evaluation, under a process approach, of a project on urban agriculture in Lima (Peru). The results show that the use of this approach, which combines different evaluation tools, allows the identification and analysis of the processes with the involved members, providing a better understanding of the real sustainability of the results.

A CAD development strategy for the next years

This paper suggests a new strategy to develop CAD applications taking into account some of the most interesting proposals which have recently appeared in the technology development arena. Programming languages, operating systems, user devices, software architecture, user interfaces and user experience are among the elements which are considered for a new development framework. This strategy considers the organizational and architectural aspects of the CAD application together with the development framework. The architectural and organizational aspects are based on the programmed design concept, which can be implemented by means of a three-level software architecture. These levels are the conceptual level based on a declarative language, the mathematical level based on the geometric formulation of the product model and the visual level based on the polyhedral representation of the model as required by the graphic card. The development framework which has been considered is Windows 8. This operating system offers three development environments, one for web pplications (HTML5 + CSS3 + JavaScript), and other for native applications C/C++) and of course yet another for .NET applications (C#, VB, F#, etc.). The use rinterface and user experience for non-web application is described ith XAML (a well known declarative XML language) and the 3D API for games and design applications is DirectX. Additionally, Windows 8 facilitates the use of hybrid solutions, in which native and managed code can interoperate easily. Some of the most remarkable advantages of this strategy are the possibility of targeting both desktop and touch screen devices with the same development framework, the usage of several programming paradigms to apply the most appropriate language to each domain and the multilevel segmentation of developers and designers to facilitate the implementation of an open network of collaborators.

A component- and connector-based approach for end-user composite web applications development

Enabling real end-user development is the next logical stage in the evolution of Internet-wide service-based applications. Successful composite applications rely on heavyweight service orchestration technologies that raise the bar far above end-user skills. This weakness can be attributed to the fact that the composition model does not satisfy end-user needs rather than to the actual infrastructure technologies. In our opinion, the best way to overcome this weakness is to offer end-to-end composition from the user interface to service invocation, plus an understandable abstraction of building blocks and a visual composition technique empowering end users to develop their own applications. In this paper, we present a visual framework for end users, called FAST, which fulfils this objective. FAST implements a novel composition model designed to empower non-programmer end users to create and share their own self-service composite applications in a fully visual fashion. We projected the development environment implementing this model as part of the European FP7 FAST Project, which was used to validate the rationale behind our approach.