Jeff Winter

The Success Factors Powering Industry-Academia Collaboration

Collaboration between industry and academia supports improvement and innovation in industry and helps to ensure industrial relevance in academic research. This article presents an exploratory study of the factors for successful collaboration between industry and academia in software research.

Reporting usability metrics experiences

It is often claimed that software development is negatively affected by infrequent, incomplete and inconsistent measurements; improving with the help of metrics is an obvious solution. Software testing provides opportunities for measurement that give organizations insight in to processes. Usability testing is part of the testing area, although it is not a commonly addressed area within software engineering, perhaps because of a split between qualitative and quantitative paradigms. We compare a usability testing framework called UTUM with principles for Software Process Improvement, and find areas of close agreement as well as areas where our work illuminates new characteristics. UTUM is found to be a useful vehicle for improvement in software engineering, dealing as it does with both product and process. Our work emphasises the importance of the neglected area of usability testing. Our experience also illustrates how the metrics have been tailored to act as a boundary object between different disciplines.

Developing Quality through Measuring Usability--The UTUM Test Package

This paper presents a tool for building quality of use into the software and software process, in the form of a test package for mass market devices. It is developed for measuring user experience, which is seen as a more encompassing term than usability. The test package, which is under constant development, is the result of a long term cooperation between industry and academia, and is in use in industrial development projects. It shows usability through the use of metrics, for efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction, supported by qualitative judgements made by a test leader/usability expert. It gives a clear demonstration of quality, from the customer and end-user point of view. The case presented here, where the test has been performed concurrently in two countries, has been a quality assurance of the test package, which has been found to work efficiently and flexibly in a complex industrial environment, with complicated relationships between customers, partners and end-users.

Meeting organisational needs and quality assurance through balancing agile and formal usability testing results

This paper deals with a case study of testing with a usability testing package (UTUM), which is also a tool for quality assurance, developed in cooperation between industry and research. It shows that within the studied company, there is a need to balance agility and formalism when producing and presenting results of usability testing to groups who we have called Designers and Product Owners. We have found that these groups have different needs, which can be placed on opposite sides of a scale, based on the agile manifesto. This becomes a Designer and a Product Owner Manifesto. The test package is seen as a successful hybrid method combining agility with formalism, satisfying organisational needs, and fulfilling the desire to create a closer relation between industry and research.

Educational Programs in e-Government – An Active, Practice- and Design-Oriented Network?

In the autumn of 2004 two higher educational programs in e-government will be starting up at Blekinge Institute of Technology in Sweden. Each will be the first of its kind in Scandinavia, and both will be offered as net-based education. The interdisciplinary group of researchers developing the educational programs sees the co-construction as the beginning of an active network of competence around higher education, R&D in the e-government area. Participatory Design, as well as ideas about e-government as ongoing co-construction, have inspired us in our work with developing the educational programs.

SPI success factors within product usability evaluation

This article presents an experience report where we compare 8 years of experience of product related usability testing and evaluation with principles for software process improvement (SPI). In theory the product and the process views are often seen to be complementary, but studies of industry have demonstrated the opposite. Therefore, more empirical studies are needed to understand and improve the present situation. We find areas of close agreement as well as areas where our work illuminates new characteristics. It has been identified that successful SPI is dependent upon being successfully combined with a business orientation. Usability and business orientation also have strong connections although this has not been extensively addressed in SPI publications. Reasons for this could be that usability focuses on product metrics whilst todays SPI mainly focuses on process metrics. Also because todays SPI is dominated by striving towards a standardized, controllable, and predictable software engineering process; whilst successful usability efforts in organisations are more about creating a creative organisational culture advocating a useful product throughout the development and product life cycle. We provide a study and discussion that supports future development when combining usability and product focus with SPI, in particular if these efforts are related to usability process improvement efforts.

Teaching PD: learning from a small industrial project

In this paper we reflect on teaching PD, in an experience report of a student project taking place in an industrial context. The paper contributes to discussions in the PD community about how PD is, and could be, taught. It looks at what happened in the project, and issues that arose, from the point of view of the students and the company. It looks at the way in which uncertainty and power relations have played a role in the project, and how the students have been affected by them. It discusses the importance of the co-design that took place, mainly around prototyping, and the difficulties students experienced when working with PD methods. It looks at the importance of the roles involved in the project. We end with important points for discussion concerning teaching PD.

What Have We Learned from the TANGO Arena for Regional Cooperation Around e-Government in Southern Sweden?

The TANGO e-government arena is a project in Southern Sweden, funded by the Innovative Actions of the European Regional Development Fund. The project is now nearing its end, and we are thus at the stage of reflectively reviewing what has actually been accomplished and how this relates to the original goals of the project. In July 2002, when the project began, the aim was to establish cooperation between the public sector, private enterprise and university-based research in designing public e-services. In cooperating around development of new, integrated services, catering to various categories of users as well as to a growing diversity of mobile technologies, we have aimed towards establishing feedback channels between practice and theory, between use and design, and between different academic disciplines where we see a need to synchronize the models and methods we work with. Our research questions have focused on exploring and managing multi-perspectivity as a resource for design. In this paper we look at how we organized our cooperation around these goals, and attempt to address those basic summing-up-the-project questions; How well have we succeeded? What have we learned in the process?

Law, Knowledge and Mobility in Local Planning

Interpretation of the law is important in the administrative decision-making process in local municipal planning, which is a co-operative process. Local mobility also plays an important role. A study of work practice highlights the need to take this into account when designing support for decision-making processes.