Proposed Early Incorporation of Usability in the Conceptual Modeling of Systems

Abstract

The current software industry requires Systems Engineering to develop methods for rapid, correct construction and, above all, for usable applications for information systems. In this paper, a methodological proposal is presented that allows defining and maintaining usability attributes, integrating them into the software development life cycle. In the early stages of software development, usability attributes are identified, based on Business Process Modeling. Then a set of different transformations is carried out to integrate them into a structure called “Requirements Baseline”, which uses the extended language lexicon (LEL) and scenarios, where it is possible to define metrics for evaluating the attributes and the relationship that exists between the different attributes and sub-attributes, based on the conceptual structure proposed by ISO / IEC 25000 (SQUARE). Sub-attributes will allow metrics to be defined that are subsequently used to evaluate different usability criteria related to product quality. In addition, it allows incorporating new usability specifications and their corresponding evaluation metrics in an integrated way to the software development process, which gives a certain degree of traceability to the entire process.