Incorporating Usability into an Object Oriented Development Process

Usability has become a key issue for the perceived quality of a software product. In order to attain a high level of usability in the software product we need to apply the set of techniques belonging to Usability Engineering. In most software development organizations where these techniques are applied, they are not integrated with the Software Engineering development process. Object oriented methods offer a bridge between Software Engineering and Usability Engineering, by means of use cases. Giving use cases a supplementary user-centered focus we can make our way through object-oriented software development combined with usability techniques. From the numerous object-oriented approaches we have chosen Larman's method because it gives priority to the interaction design over the design to the internal part of the system to develop. A generally applicable joint Usability Engineering – Software Engineering development process has been defined by modifying Larman's method to integrate usability techniques where appropriate. The proposed process gives advice on the usability techniques to be used in every phase of such joint development process.