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A study about HCI in practice of interactive system
development using CMMI-DEV
Taisa Guidini Gonçalves, Káthia Marçal de Oliveira, Christophe Kolski
To cite this version:
Taisa Guidini Gonçalves, Káthia Marçal de Oliveira, Christophe Kolski. A study about HCI in practice
of interactive system development using CMMI-DEV. 29ème conférence francophone sur l’Interaction
Homme-Machine, AFIHM, Aug 2017, Poitiers, France. pp.169-177, �10.1145/3132129.3132146�. �hal-
01577918�
A study about HCI in practice of
interactive system development
using CMMI-DEV
T. G. Gonçalves
LAMIH CNRS UMR 8201
Le Mont Houy cedex 9, France
taisa.guidinigoncalves@etu.univ-
valenciennes.fr
K. M. Oliveira
LAMIH CNRS UMR 8201
Le Mont Houy cedex 9, France
kathia.oliveira@univ-valenciennes.fr
C. Kolski
LAMIH CNRS UMR 8201
Le Mont Houy cedex 9, France
christophe.kolski@univ-valenciennes.fr
ABSTRACT
Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has proposed many methods, techniques and
standards for the development of interactive systems. Despite the great recognition of many of
these approaches in academia, little is known about the state of practice in industry. To what
extent are they known and used, while using a defined software process, to develop interactive
systems? What is their level of use compared to software engineering approaches? This paper
presents a study that we have conducted to answer these questions. This study is developed on top
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ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5109-6/17/08. h!ps://doi.org/10.1145/3132129.3132146
A study about HCI in practice using CMMI-DEV
IHM’17, August 2017, Poitiers, FRANCE
of one of the widest used software process improvement model: CMMI (Capability Maturity
Model Integration). This paper presents the planning of this study, the research protocol and some
initial results.
CCS CONCEPTS
• Human-centered computing →; Empirical studies in HCI
KEYWORDS
Human-computer Interaction, Interactive systems, Capability Maturity Model, Software
engineering
ACM Reference format:
T. G. Gonçalves, K. M. Oliveira, and C. Kolski. 2017. A study about HCI in practice of interactive system
development using CMMI-DEV. In Proceedings of 29eme Conference Francophone sur l’Interaction Homme-
Machine , Poitiers- Futuroscope, FR, Août 2017 (IHM 2017), 9 pages.
DOI: 10.1145/3132129.3132146
1 INTRODUCTION
Undoubtedly, software process capability and maturity (SPCM) models are reached a large use in
industry [14]. These models are collection of software engineering best practices that help
organization to improve their process. SPCM models define practices for the development of any
kind of system. They do not indicate any specific technique, method, or any specific approach;
they describe what should be performed by the developers of software systems who are free to
choose the approaches in order to implement the practices. One can suppose therefore that
Human-Computer Interaction approaches should naturally be applied when SPCM models are
used in the development of interactive systems. Based on this belief and taking profit of the large
use of CMMI in industry, this paper presents a study that aims to investigate to what extent the
HCI approaches are known and used by software developers. Moreover, to better analyze the
results in a complete way considering the software development view we have also investigated if
the developers know and use HCI approaches as they know and use Software Engineering
approaches.
To that end, we first identified HCI approaches [6-7] adequate to support practices of the
CMMI for development [2] based on HCI experts’ opinion. After that, we looked in the literature
software engineering approaches used to support the practices. Then we defined a specific
research protocol and a questionnaire (survey), and we have surveyed enterprises of the top ten
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A study about HCI in practice using CMMI-DEV
IHM’17, August 2017, Poitiers, FRANCE
countries that use CMMI according to CMMI Institute
1
. In this paper, we present this research
with some initial results from industry.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly presents the main concepts of CMMI used
in this study. Section 3 presents how we defined the HCI and SE approaches to support the
practices of CMMI. Section 4 and 5 present the planning and execution of the study. Section 6
discusses the related works and section 7 presents some final remarks.
2 A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF CMMI
In the 1980s, the US Department of Defense (DoD) requested the development of a framework of
criteria for evaluating its software providers. They financed the Software Engineering Institute
(SEI) that presented in 1991 the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) [10]. In 2001, SEI proposed a
new version of this model, the CMMI-DEV (Capability Maturity Model Integration for
Developers), which encompasses the best practices of different models. The CMMI-DEV is a
process model (best practices repository) for the realization of any type of product (or system). It is
however in the development and maintenance of software that it is most used. It is currently in
version 1.3 [2].
The best practices of CMMI-DEV are organized in-group to address specific goals of different
process areas. The CMMI-DEV v1.3 presents 22 process areas that cover engineering, support,
project and process management activities. The engineering process area is directed related to the
development and evaluation of software systems (our interest in this paper) that are: Requirements
Development, Technical Solution, Product Integration, Validation and Verification They
encompass 40 specific practices (SP) grouped in 14 specific goals (SG). To illustrate, an example for
the Requirements Development process area is the SG1- Develop Customer Requirements composed
of two practices: SP1.1 Elicit Needs; SP1.2 Transform Stakeholder Needs into Customer Requirements.
Moreover, CMMI-DEV uses levels to describe an evolutionary path for an organization that
wants to improve its processes. Two types of levels are defined for software process improvement:
(i) capability levels, improvement of one or more chosen process areas; and (ii) maturity levels,
improvement of a set of pre-defined process area. Maturity levels are the most applied in industry
organizing the process areas in a staged representation where each level is composed of several
process areas. The staged representation has five maturity levels (1-5). Process areas of engineering
are in the Defined level (3), which means the organization uses a defined process to develop its
systems.
3 SUPPORTING CMMI-DEV WITH HCI APPROACHES
To apply the best practices of CMMI-DEV, software developers should use the existing workbench
of techniques, methods, standards and methodologies. From this idea, our first
1
http://partners.cmmiinstitute.com/find-partner-organization/
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A study about HCI in practice using CMMI-DEV
IHM’17, August 2017, Poitiers, FRANCE
Table 1: HCI categories x Examples
HCI Category
Examples
Task Analysis
Methods for
HCI
CTT (Concur Task
Tree); K-MAD (Kernel
of Model for Activity
Description); HTA
(Hierarchical Task
Analysis); SADT
(Structured Analysis
and Design
Technique); GTA
(Groupware Task
Analysis).
Evaluation
methods for
HCI review
Heuristic evaluation;
Cognitive
walkthrough;
Groupware
walkthrough.
research activity was to scan all engineering specific practices from CMMI-DEV to identify where
it was indicated that HCI issues should be taken into account.
To analyze the documentation, we initially seek explicit citations of HCI engineering by looking
for: (i) HCI keywords (for example, external interface, end user, prototype); (ii) examples of
techniques or methods of HCI (e.g. end-user task analysis, HCI models); and (iii) examples of work
products (e.g. interface design specifications, user manual). Then, we looked for citations that were
not directly related to HCI Engineering but that we could interpret in benefit of the use of it. We
classify this information as implicit citations. Explicit and implicit citations were highlighted in the
text and reviewed together in a final reading.
With all the identified citations and considering the literature of HCI (for example, [3, 11, 12])
and existing reviews of HCI approaches that support system development (for example, [4,5,13]),
we proposed an initial set of approaches organized in 10 HCI categories. For each HCI category,
we included examples of methods, techniques, and standards. Table 1 presents some categories
and their examples of approaches. Considering the identified citations in each practice, we
associated each category as support for the accomplishment of the practices. For example, “Task
Analysis Methods for HCI” was proposed as approaches to support the specific practices (SP1.1
and SP1.2) of the specific goal 1 of requirements development previous presented. In total, we had
33 propositions supported by HCI categories that were related to specific practices.
With this initial set, we interviewed twenty HCI experts (19 years of experience in average) well
known in the HCI community. They were asked to analyze all propositions presented in a form
(see example in Figure 1) and answer about their level of agreement justifying it. Each interview
took in average 1.5 hours. The experts used the material to discuss and explain the use of several
approaches in the development of interactive systems based on their own experience in academia
and industry (14 experts declared have worked in the industry).
Process Area
and Specific
Goal (SG)
Specific Practice
(SP)
Methods,
techniques,
standards and
patterns of HCI
Answer
Justification
I agree
I partially
agree
I don’t
agree
Requirements
Development
SG1 Develop
Customer
Requirements
SP1.1 Elicit
Needs
Elicit stakeholder
needs,
expectations,
constraints, and
interfaces for all
phases of the
product lifecycle.
Task Analysis
Methods for HCI
x
“Task
Analysis is
further
modeling
activity than
an elicitation
activity.”
Examples: CTT,
K-MAD, HTA,
SADT, GTA.
Figure 1: Simplified extract of the questionnaire (adapted from [7])
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