Collaborative usability testing to facilitate stakeholder involvement

Stakeholder involvement is an essential part of Value-Based Software Engineering. A critical part of the software engineering life cycle concerns usability testing. System usability refers to the effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction with which users can use the system for their relevant tasks. Unfortunately stakeholder involvement in usability testing is costly and challenging to organize. This chapter presents a repeatable collaborative usability testing process supported by a Group Support System that was developed and evaluated in a series of workshops involving a real system. The results show that the collaborative usability testing process facilitates stakeholder involvement through stakeholder expectation management, visualization and tradeoff analysis, prioritization of usability action items, the use of advanced groupware tools, and a simple business case analysis. Furthermore, the process can be considered productive and stakeholders reported substantial levels of satisfaction with it.