An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems.

Eric Ries was born in September 1978. He graduated from Yale University and moved to silicon Valley in the beginning of the millennium. He pioneered the philosophy of Lean Startup, based on his experience with multiple startups, primary being IMVU which he co-founded along with Will Harvey in 2004. Eric Ries originated his Lean Startup philosophy after getting inspired from the Japanese Philosophy of Lean Manufacturing.

The Lean Startup:How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses

To better understand what researchers and practitioners consider to be the key components of the definition of web accessibility and to propose a unified definition of web accessibility, we conducted an analysis of 50 definitions of web accessibility. The definitions were drawn from a range of books, papers, standards, guidelines and online sources, aimed at both practitioners and researchers, from the across the time period of web accessibility work, from 1996 to 2014 and from authors in 21 different countries. The analysis extracted six core concepts that are used in many definitions, which are incorporated into a unified definition of web accessibility as "all people, particularly disabled and older people, can use websites in a range of contexts of use, including mainstream and assistive technologies; to achieve this, websites need to be designed and developed to support usability across these contexts".

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2745555.2746653

Towards a unified definition of web accessibility

Achieving a shared understanding of requirements is difficult in any situation, even more so in global software development projects. In such environments, people must deal not only with the lack of face to face communication, but also with other issues such as time difference, cultural diversity and a large amount of information originating from different sources throughout the world. Obtaining the right requirements therefore implies extra effort. In order to minimize such problems, we propose a framework that focuses on analyzing the factors that may be problematic in global software development and which suggests a set of strategies to improve the requirements elicitation process in such environments. In this paper, we describe the different phases of our framework and present the results of an experiment that test part of this framework. The results indicate that applying some of the strategies proposed in the framework seems to positively affect the stakeholders’ satisfaction with regard to communication. Moreover, the quality of the written software requirements specifications seems to be better as well when using those strategies.

A framework to improve communication during the requirements elicitation process in GSD projects

http://jatjournal.org/index.php/jat/article/download/51/10

The nature of accessibility studies

The development of accessible Web software is complicated for several reasons. Though some of them are technological, the majority are related with the need to compose different and, many times, unrelated design concerns which may be functional as in the case of most of the specific application's requirements, or non-functional such as Accessibility itself. In this paper, we present a novel approach to conceive, design and develop Accessible Web applications in an aspect-oriented manner. In order to reach our goal, we provide some modeling techniques that we specifically developed for handling the non-functional, generic and crosscutting characteristics of the Accessibility concerns. Specifically, we have enriched User Interaction Diagrams with integration points, which are used to reason and document Accessibility for activity modeling during user interface design. Then by instantiating a Softgoal Interdependency Graph template with association tables, we work on an abstract interface model (composed by ontology widgets) to obtain a concrete and accessible interface model for the Web application being developed. We use a real application example to illustrate our ideas and point out the advantages of a clear separation of concerns throughout the development life-cycle.

/pdf/engineering-accessible-web-applications-an-aspect-oriented-4awq44qo2r.pdf

Engineering Accessible Web Applications. An Aspect-Oriented Approach

In a scene where stakeholders are geographically distributed, communication presents new challenges for research areas. Considering the characteristics of interpersonal communication and the virtual area where it is carried out, the importance of applying interdisciplinary approaches, such as Cognitive Engineering, is currently increasing. Particularly, our proposal aims at improving the interaction between stakeholders by applying learning models when eliciting distributed software requirements. These models might help characterise the way people interact with distributed environment abstracting information or procedures. Identifying a type of interaction a stakeholder is more suitable for, would led to the use of specific groupware tools as a way of improving communication during a requirements elicitation process.

/pdf/classifying-groupware-tools-to-improve-communication-in-1ks8jbk39f.pdf

Classifying groupware tools to improve communication in geographically distributed elicitation

Usually, a huge number of tools and proposals help developers assess Accessibility of Web applications; however, looking from the designer perspective, there is no such a similar situation. It seems that creating accessible Web sites is more expensive and complicated than creating Web sites and then assessing/modifying them. Although this feeling may be largely true, the benefits of modeling Accessibility at early design stages outweigh the needs of a developer to implement that Accessibility. A designer can learn the basics of Web Accessibility and then he/she should be able to incorporate this knowledge into his/her software architecture. The point is to have an idea of how to do so from the beginning. In this paper, we briefly introduce our proposal to model Web Accessibility by moving from abstract to concrete architectural views using aspect-orientation. Our approach takes advantages of modeling Accessibility as an aspect-oriented concern, which is independently treated but related to architectural pieces. We illustrate the approach with a case study and elaborate some insights from the designer perspective.

/pdf/accessibility-at-early-stages-insights-from-the-designer-1yphoqb90h.pdf

Accessibility at early stages: insights from the designer perspective

Web accessibility is one facet of Web quality in use, and one of the main actors upon which the success of a Web site depends. In spite of these facts, surveys repeatedly show that the accessibility at the Web for people with disabilities is disappointingly low. At the Web, most pages present many kinds of accessible barriers for people with disabilities. The former scenario encouraged research communities and organizations to develop a large range of approaches to support Web accessibility. Currently, there are so many approaches available that comparisons have emerged to clarify their intent and effectiveness. With this situation in mind, this chapter will discuss the importance of Web accessibility assessment and compare 15 different approaches found in literature. To do so, we provide an evaluation framework, WAAM, and instantiate them by classifying the different proposals. The aim of WAAM is to clarify from an evaluation and classification perspective the situation at the accessibility arena. INFORMATION SCIENCE PUBLISHING IGR5157

Comparing Approaches to Web Accessibility Assessment

Although Accessibility has not yet gained much recognition as a crucial non-functional requirement like security, performance, accuracy and usability, it is a vital attribute for people with disabilities. Developing accessible Web applications is usually hard for several reasons. Firstly, there is a significant knowledge gap between developers and Accessibility specialists. Secondly, there is little evidence of design approaches dealing with Accessibility from the beginning of the design process. In most cases, Accessibility is regarded as a programming issue or even dealt with when the Web application is already fully developed. Consequently, the process of making this application accessible involves significant redesign and recoding, which might be out of the scope of the project and/or hardly affordable. In this paper, we present an aspect-oriented approach to handle the non-functional, generic and crosscutting characteristics of the Accessibility concerns. Our approach is supported by several techniques, which are embedded in a software tool aiming at facilitating transferring the approach to industry.

/pdf/supporting-an-aspect-oriented-approach-to-web-accessibility-35mdvxqyhy.pdf

Adriana Elba Martín

Papers

Engineering Accessible Web Applications. An Aspect-Oriented Approach

Classifying groupware tools to improve communication in geographically distributed elicitation

Accessibility at early stages: insights from the designer perspective

Comparing Approaches to Web Accessibility Assessment

Supporting an Aspect-Oriented Approach to Web Accessibility Design