Evaluation in software ergonomie: Methods and models in the software development cycle

Abstract

Ergonomic evaluation of software has gained growing importance in software design. This paper presents methods of software ergonomic evaluation based on a new classification scheme which distinguishes descriptive, predictive and other methods; role and value of evaluation models are discussed as well. Evaluation models integrate one or more methods into the software design process, and organise their effective application. The paper discusses method based, criteria based, and process based evaluation models, and it is shown that, for most models, explicit advice is still lacking how the models fit into the software development life cycle. The final part of the paper deals with the connection between evaluation models and models of software development. Since such connections are presently - at best - only loose, it is a challenging task to integrate these areas.