An empirical approach for evaluating the usability of model-driven tools

• Published in: Science of Computer Programming
• Main Authors: Condori-Fernandez, Nelly, Panach Navarrete, José Ignacio, Baars, Arthur Iwan, Vos, Tanja Ernestina, Pastor López, Oscar
• Other Authors: Universitat Politècnica de València. Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos y Computación - Departament de Sistemes Informàtics i Computació, Universitat Politècnica de València. Centro de Investigación en Métodos de Producción de Software - Centre d'Investigació en Mètodes de Producció de Software, Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier 2013
• Subjects: info; manag; Fernandez; Navarrete; Orca
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2012.07.017; http://hdl.handle.net/10251/43724

S MDD tools are very useful to draw conceptual models and to automate code generation. Even though this would bring many benefits, wide adoption of MDD tools is not yet a reality. Various research activities are being undertaken to find why and to provide the required solutions. However, insufficient research has been done on a key factor for the acceptance of MDD tools: usability. With the help of end-users, this paper presents a framework to evaluate the usability of MDD tools. The framework will be used as a basis for a family of experiments to get clear insights into the barriers to usability that prevent MDD tools from being widely adopted in industry. To illustrate the applicability of our framework, we instantiated it for performing a usability evaluation of a tool named INTEGRANOVA. Furthermore, we compared the outcome of the study with another usability evaluation technique based on ergonomic criteria. This work has been developed with the support of the Intra European Marie Curie Fellowship Grant 50911302 PIEF-2010, MICINN (TIN2008-00555, PROS-Req TIN2010-19130-C02-02), GVA (ORCA PROMETEO/2009/015), and co-financed with ERDF. We also acknowledge the support of the ITEA2 Call 3 UsiXML (20080026) and financed by the MITYC under the project TSI-020400-2011-20. Our thanks also to Ignacio Romeu for the video data gathering setup. Condori-Fernandez, N.; Panach Navarrete, JI.; Baars, AI.; Vos, TE.; Pastor López, O. (2013). An empirical approach for evaluating the usability of model-driven tools. Science of Computer Programming. 78(11):2245-2258. doi:10.1016/j.scico.2012.07.017 2245 2258 78 11