Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The outcomes of the above activities represent the
Evaluation Plan
that will be
used as input by the next stage.
3.4 Execution of the Evaluation
The aim of this stage is to execute the evaluation in accordance with the Evaluation
Plan. The evaluator applies the operationalized metrics to the artifacts that have been
selected. If the rating levels obtained identify a UP, the elements of the artifact in-
volved that contribute to achieving this metric value are analyzed. This helps us to
determine the source of the usability problem thanks to the traceability that exists
among the models in an MDWD process.
The outcomes of this stage are: a
platform-independent usability report
, which col-
lect the UPs that are detected during the evaluation of PIMs; a
platform-specific us-
ability report
, which collects the UPs that are detected during the evaluation of PSMs;
and a
final Web application usability report
, which collects the UPs that are detected
during the evaluation of CMs.
3.5 Analysis of Changes
The aim of this stage is to classify all the UPs detected from each of the usability
reports shown above and to analyze the recommendations provided in order to pro-
pose changes with which to correct the artifacts. Usability problems whose source is
located in PIMs that are related to content and navigation (e.g., UP detected in struc-
tural models, navigational models) are collected to create the
improvement report in
analysis
. Usability problems whose source is located in PIMs that are related to pres-
entation (e.g., UP detected in abstract user interfaces models) are collected to create
the
improvement report in design
. Usability problems whose source is located in
PSMs or transformation rules among PIMs and PSMs are collected to create the
im-
provement report in model transformation
. Finally, usability problems whose source
is located in the generation rules among PSMs and CMs are collected to create the
improvement report in code generation
. The last two reports are useful for providing
feedback in order to improve the Computer-Aided Web Engineering tool (CAWE)
that supports the Web development method and performs the transformations among
models, along with the generation rules among models and the final source code.
It is important to note that after applying the changes suggested by the improve-
ment reports, re-evaluations of the artifacts might be necessary.
4 Case Study
An exploratory case study was performed by following the guidelines presented in
[25] in order to study the feasibility of applying WUEP in industrial contexts. The
stages of which the case study was comprised were: design, preparation, collection of
data, and analysis of data, each of which is explained below.
4.1 Design of the Case Study
The case study was designed by considering the five components that are proposed in
[25]: purpose of the study, underlying conceptual framework, research questions to be
addressed, sampling strategy, and methods employed.
