Inspeção de usabilidade aplicada a métodos ágeis: um estudo de caso

Abstract

Companies using agile development methods are concerned about delivering quality software products. Usability is an important software quality requirement. However, a number of companies have difficulties integrating usability processes with agile practices. Few studies have been conducted about this topic. The studies conducted so far have suggested that there is a significant amount of work to be done in order to achieve the appropriate integration between agile and usability processes. The present work proposed the study of the use of heuristic evaluation of a Web site in the context of a small software development company that uses the Scrum agile method. In order to accomplish this goal, a case study was designed and conduted to compare the use of two versions of the heuristic evaluation method: the standard and the collaborative version, which were performed by two different teams of evaluators from the company with equivalent usability expertise levels. The results showed that the collaborative evaluation tended to find more serious usability problems than the standard version of the method. It also had good acceptance from the participants, despite the fact that it did not find more usability problems than the standard evaluation. It was concluded that the collaborative version of the heuristic evaluation is suitable for usability inspection in agile development environments. It enabled achieving productivity gains, as well as knowledge sharing between members of the development team and better alignment for integration in processes with iterative cycles.