Theodore D. Hellmann

Integrating Agile and User-Centered Design: A Systematic Mapping and Review of Evaluation and Validation Studies of Agile-UX

Agile software engineering and user-centered design are two important development processes for ensuring that an application has good user experience. However, integrating these two different processes into a single Agile-UX approach remains difficult. We performed a systematic mapping study to identify relevant research and understand what the field of Agile-UX looks like at present. This mapping discovered that there were only a few evaluation and validation papers published to date, so we performed a review of these papers to better understand the recommendations of these types of papers. Based on this, we are able both to provide a discussion of common trends in these papers that should be of interest to practitioners and to identify gaps in existing literature that indicate strong opportunities for future work.

Agile Testing: Past, Present, and Future -- Charting a Systematic Map of Testing in Agile Software Development

Testing has been a cornerstone of agile software development methodologies since early in the history of the field. However, the terminology used to describe the field - as well as the evidence in existing literature - is largely inconsistent. In order to better structure our understanding of the field and to guide future work, we conducted a systematic mapping of agile testing. We investigated five research questions: which authors are most active in agile testing; what is agile testing used for; what types of paper tend to be published in this field; how do practitioners and academics contribute to research in this field; and what tools are used to conduct agile testing? Of particular interest is our investigation into the source of these publications, which indicates that academics and practitioners focus on different types of publication and, disturbingly, that the number of practitioner papers in the sources we searched is strongly down since 2010.

Supporting Test-Driven Development of Graphical User Interfaces Using Agile Interaction Design

Test-driven development of GUIs is currently very difficult. On the one hand, to avoid frequent updates of the tests, test-driven development requires a degree of stability in the application under development, whereas GUIs are very likely to change during development. On the other hand, the easiest way of creating GUI tests - using a capture/replay tool - requires the GUI to exist. This paper introduces a new approach to user-interface test-driven development, wherein a capture-replay tool is used to record test scripts from low-fidelity prototypes. This allows GUI tests to be

Distributed and Automated Usability Testing of Low-Fidelity Prototypes

Lack of tool support is hindering the growing interest in incorporating usability evaluation into agile software development practices. To address this concern we have developed ActiveStory Enhanced, a tool for creation and remote evaluation of low-fidelity prototypes. Building on its predecessor, ActiveStory Enhanced remotely collects more forms of usability data and provides new visualizations of this data to aid in the detection of usability flaws.

Testing of web services - A systematic mapping

Web services have been gaining popularity since the introduction of Service-oriented architecture and cloud computing. With more and more legacy systems migrating to service-oriented architectures and the cloud, an urgent need for proper testing techniques is becoming apparent. This paper provides an overview of the current state of research into testing of web services. To understand this subject, we conducted a systematic mapping. The results suggest that research into testing web services is still in its early stages. We provide recommendations about holes in existing research that need to be addressed and directions for future research that will have maximum novelty and potential for impact on the field.

Usable results from the field of API usability: A systematic mapping and further analysis

Modern software development often involves the use of complex, reusable components called Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Developers use APIs to complete tasks they could not otherwise accomplish in a reasonable time. These components are now vital to mainstream software development. But as APIs have become more important, understanding how to make them more usable is becoming a significant research question. To assess the current state of research in the field, we conducted a systematic mapping. A total of 28 papers were reviewed and categorized based on their research type and on the evaluation method employed by its authors. We extended the analysis of a subset of the papers we reviewed beyond the usual limits of a systematic map in order to more closely examine details of their evaluations - such as their structure and validity - and to summarize their recommendations. Based on these results, common problems in the field are discussed and future research directions are suggested.

Agile Interaction Design and Test-Driven Development of User Interfaces – A Literature Review

This chapter describes the development of GUI-based applications, from usability engineering and prototyping to acceptance test-driven development, in an agile context. An overview of current agile interaction design practices will be presented, including a thorough analysis of the current role of prototyping and current attempts to facilitate test-driven development of GUI systems, as presented in academic and industrial literature. Traditional usability engineering approaches shows that if user input is taken into consideration early in the development process by repeatedly conducting usability tests on low-fidelity prototypes of the GUI system, the final version of the GUI will be both more usable and less likely to require revision. The major risk associated with test-driven development of GUIs is the high likelihood of change in the target GUI, which can make test development unnecessarily expensive and time consuming. A unification of these styles of development will be presented, along with a prediction of how this process can be used to simplify creating testable GUI-based applications by agile teams.

Rule-Based Exploratory Testing of Graphical User Interfaces

This paper introduces rule-based exploratory testing, an approach to GUI testing that combines aspects of manual exploratory testing with rule-based test automation. This approach uses short, automated rules to increase the bug-detection capability of recorded exploratory test sessions. A preliminary evaluation found that this approach can be used to detect both general and application-specific bugs, but that rules for general bugs are easier to transfer between applications. Also, despite the advantages of keyword-based testing, it interferes with the transfer of rules between applications.

People-Centered Software Development: An Overview of Agile Methodologies

This chapter gives an overview of agile software development processes and techniques. The first part of the chapter covers the major agile project management techniques with a focus on project planning. Iteration planning and interaction design approaches are given special focus. The second part of the chapter covers agile quality assurance with a focus on test-driven development and the state space of testing. Current problems in agile testing, including measuring test quality and testing applications with large state spaces, are discussed.

Test-Driven Development of Graphical User Interfaces: A Pilot Evaluation

This paper presents a technique for test-driven development of GUI based applications, as well as a pilot evaluation. In our approach, user interface prototypes are created in such a way as to allow capture/replay tools to record interactions with them. These recordings can then be replayed on the actual GUI as it is being developed in a test-driven fashion. The pilot evaluation found that developers integrated GUI tests, based on user interface prototypes,into their development process and used them as a way to determine when a feature is actually complete.Study participants felt that TDD of GUI based applications is useful.