Enhancing Quality of Software and Quality of Experience through User Interfaces
Pedro Luis Mateo Navarro - PhD Thesis
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PhD Thesis Defense Slides
Those are the slides used for the defense of this PhD thesis:
Thesis Summary
This PhD thesis addresses two different approaches to achieve quality of a software through the analysis of user-system interaction:
- On the one hand, the quality of the different components of interaction (i.e., input, output, and context) can be achieved separately. The main advantage of this approach is that tools and methods can focus their efforts on achieving the quality of a single component of interaction, and, as a consequence, the quality of the entire software is enhanced.
- On the other hand, interaction can be assessed as a whole, as a single flow of actions from the user to the system and vice versa. In this approach the main advantage is that methods try to achieve the quality of the "whole thing" and not of the parts compounding it. This approach keeps the totality of the interaction process and enables the analysis of those cause-effect relationships between the actions of the user and the system.
This thesis outlines four main research goals structured into two blocks depending on whether the interaction components are analyzed separately (Block 1) or the interaction process is assessed as a whole (Block 2):
- Goal 1.1 suggests to find a framework to support the development of testing tools aimed at validating the software response. It involves supporting the automation of GUI testing processes that are often performed manually, as well as allowing the simulation of a human tester to implement testing in a real, reliable, and robust context. Ease the integration of these tools into applications of a different nature was a goal as well. In helping to achieve this goal, this PhD thesis proposed OHT. The OHT (Open HMI Tester) framework provides an open and adaptable architecture for the development of GUI testing tools.
Go to OHT project or OHT Plus project - Goal 1.2 aims at finding a lightweight and easy-to-integrate solution for implementing input data verification processes into GUI developments. The user input must be valid and conform to the data requirements, which should be written using a verification language chosen by the developers. This solution should be interactive to ease the work of developers, testers, and users during the whole life-cycle of a software. According to these requirements, this PhD thesis proposed S-DAVER (Script-based DAta VERification), a runtime verification framework that validates input data while the user is interacting with the software.
Go to S-DAVER project - Goal 2.1 suggests to find a generic description of multimodal interaction to support its instrumentation and assessment. This description has to capture the dynamic nature of the interaction between the user and the system. Furthermore, the comparison between different interaction records should be allowed, regardless of the execution context from which they were previously recorded. This PhD tries to fulfill these requirements with PALADIN (Practice-oriented Analysis and Description of Multimodal Interaction), a runtime model arranging a set of parameters which are used to quantify the interaction between the user and the system in multimodal systems.
Go to PALADIN project - Goal 2.2 aims at providing a framework to support the assessment of user experiences in mobile scenarios. Such a framework has to include a generic and dynamic description of the surrounding context of interaction, as well as a set of metrics to capture users impressions about interaction. As a result, this framework should provide unified criteria for the assessment of systems usability and QoE in different mobile and non-mobile scenarios. With this purpose, this PhD thesis presented CARIM. CARIM (Context-Aware and Ratings Interaction Model) is a runtime model describing the interaction between the user and the system, its context, and the perceived quality of users.
Go to CARIM project
The tools and models designed and implemented in this PhD thesis have been used for practical applications within SAES (the software company with which we colaborate) as well as in different experiments conducted with real users, thus demonstrating that the proposed methods are at the forefront of scientific research and ready for industrial application.
Examination Board
- Dr. Jesús J. García Molina, University of Murcia, http://dis.um.es/~jmolina/
- Dr. David Griol Barres, University of Granada, University Carlos III Madrid, http://www.inf.uc3m.es/component/comprofiler/userprofile/dgriol
- Dr. Benjamin Weiss, Quality and Usability Lab, Deutsche Telekom Laboratories / TU Berlin, http://www.tu-berlin.de/?id=bweiss
- Dr. Zoraida Callejas Carrión, University of Granada, http://lsi.ugr.es/zoraida/
- Dr. Joaquín Nicolás Ros, University of Murcia, http://dis.um.es/~jnicolas/
PhD Advisors
- Dr. Diego Sevilla Ruiz, University of Murcia, http://www.ditec.um.es/~dsevilla/ + /
- Dr. Gregorio Martínez Pérez, University of Murcia, http://webs.um.es/gregorio/