Claudia Zapata

Integrating UCD and an Agile Methodology in the Development of a Mobile Catalog of Plants

The integration of User Centered Design (UCD) and agile methodologies for software development is suitable to achieve software products with higher degree of usability. However there are few controlled experiments that can show the advantages and the approach of this integration. The present paper describes the whole process of integrate one of the popular agile methodologies, Extreme Programming (XP), with UCD applied to the construction of a software application. The project deals with a mobile application about the vegetation from Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru that allows users to search, recognize and find plants around the university campus.

Integration of Usability and Agile Methodologies: A Systematic Review

Nowadays, Agile Methodologies are widely used and accepted among software development teams. These methodologies allow speeding up the development process while permitting less documentation and more flexible processes. Moreover, Usability is a measure of software quality and has become more important with the changes that users have experienced. This paper aims to answer how usability and agile methodologies have been integrated into the various stages of software development through a systematic review.

Usability Heuristics for Web Banking

The rapid development of technology has changed the way in which humans and computers interact. This revolution is no stranger to the banking sector, there is a tendency to migrate the services offered by financial institutions face channels to remote channels. This research will focus on the study of the applications of web banking, and through the analysis of the problems it faces, it will seek to establish design guidelines in the form of evaluation methods that allow us to measure the degree of usability of a site, thus contributing to the increase in the degree of user satisfaction by improving the usability of these applications. To achieve this goal, a set of proposed usability heuristics; these also consider issues relating to safety. The proposed heuristic was evaluated in order to compare their effectiveness in contrast to existing heuristics.

An approach for effort estimation in incremental software development using cosmic function points

Context: The current trend for software construction consists in developing software through increments, which is recommended by recognized methodologies such as Rational Unified Process or Agile Methodologies. Although Cosmic Functional Size Measurement Method is one of the most known techniques to estimate effort and cost in software projects, there is little evidence that indicates how to adapt it to non-waterfall lifecycles, such as incremental ones. Goal: This paper presents an approach called Incremental CFP that allows estimating effort for each increment using Cosmic Function Points (CFP) and COCOMOs effort adjustment factor (EAF). Method: In order to validate this new approach, we employed data from two different projects in which undergraduate students had to work originally with IFPUG function points. Results: The results were considered as promising given that the difference between the estimated effort and the real effort was lower than 30% for the second increment. Conclusions: With a minimum difference between the estimated effort and the real effort, it was possible to establish that the proposed technique is acceptable and predictive. However, more study cases should be performed before generalizing its applicability for different contexts.

Videogames, Motivation and History of Peru: Designing an Educational Game About Mariano Melgar

The use of video games as pedagogical tools that can be used within the classroom has been an initiative that has been in use for a few years with special emphasis since 2000. Therefore, using methodologies and tools that motivate students is an interest of the educational field. However, it is important to delve into the benefits of video games as educational materials that can motivate students. In addition, the motivation within a video game entails that the student can not only remember the facts and characters, but also that they have the initiative to ask or know more about it, which is extremely useful for active learning. This study aims to design a video game that improves students’ motivation on the history of Peru. The game focuses on the historical figure of Mariano Melgar, hero forerunner of the independence.

Improving the Usability in a Video Game Through Continuous Usability Evaluations

User experience in a software product - like a videogame - has a great impact on the success and acceptation of it. Players feel better when they can learn and understand easily the game’s goals and how to reach them. The purpose of this study is to show evidence that continuous user experience tests combined with software improvements can make that acceptation reached in a smarter way. These tasks are accomplished integrating usability techniques and Agile Methodology.

UCD and Agile Methodology in the Development of a Cultural Heritage Platform

Cultural heritage is contemplated as one of the essential components of any society, considered beyond personal, social or national attitudes, its conservation must be done in benefit of humanity. The techniques used for dissemination have been changing over the years, making Information and Communication Technologies the main protagonists. The purpose of this study is the implementation of a native mobile application that disseminates information about the cultural heritage using augmented reality through a mobile phone, in such a way as to create a conducive environment to stimulate learning. Usability becomes an important characteristic in the implementation of this tool as it must be massive and intuitive, reason why it was decided to apply a proposed methodology to integrated Agile Methodologies with User-Centered design and show the software development process under these guidelines.

Results of the Improvement on Synthesis System's Speech Quality for Spanish Using Adaptive Automatas

Abstract— this article presents the experimentation and results of applying the Adaptive Automata technique to a Spanish voice synthesizer looking for its improvement. It shows a review of the design and implementation of the proposed solution, both aspects are fully explained in a previous work. It also highlights the formal methods available to measure the improvement on the voice quality, specially the naturalness feature. Lastly, it presents the results of experimentation with users for both versions, the original and modified system. These results show that significant improvement can be made in understanding the meaning of read texts by incorporating linguistic concepts through the use of adaptive technology.