User Evaluation Support Through Development Environment for Agile Software Teams

Abstract

User evaluation is generally performed early in the development process to reveal usability problems, design flaws, and errors and correct them before deploying. Due to the short iterations of agile development, implementing user evaluation as part of the development process is a challenge that is often neglected. In a previous work, we proposed an approach that would enable the integration of user evaluation throughout the development process, by managing and automating user evaluation activities from with the integrated development environment (IDE). In this work, we focus on a case study in which small-sized agile software teams, made up of students in an annual software engineering project course, applied our integrated user evaluation approach for developing their software projects. The feedbacks from these agile teams show the intuitiveness and effectiveness of our integration approach.