Usability as a Dominant Quality Attribute
This work addresses the issue for software architects and developers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing strategies without introducing new methods or data.
The paper tackles the problem of usability being overlooked in software architecture design by reviewing and elaborating strategies for incorporating usability characteristics, providing a comparison of different approaches and their pros and cons.
Whenever an architect or a team of architects begins an architectural design, there are certain goals set to achieve. There are many factors involved in setting up goals for the architecture design such as type of the project, end user perspective, functional and non-functional requirements and so on. This paper reviews and further elaborates strategy for the usability characteristics of software architecture. Although user centered designs are tremendously gaining popularity, still in many design scenarios, usability is barely even considered as one of the primary goals. This work provides an opportunity to compare different strategies and evaluate their pros and cons.