Case: reducing program bugs
Early user-testing before programming improves software quality.
RIB
Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency has developed an application - RIB - that is a source of information for everyone working with civil protection and alert. An earlier version was partly developed by Jenny Nilsson using Ozlab.
This case study consisted of a large update cycle (decision support system for civil protection).
The update involved a complete re-programming of the four largest system modules of which two were used for the analysis in this presentation.
Results in brief
Early user-testing resulted in program code that had:
- half the number of errors
- < 1/5 of the number of critical errors
compared to code based solely on requirements emanating from:
- users’ verbal opinions and
- non-interactive mock-ups presented to the content experts.
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These findings have been presented at I-USED at INTERACT in Uppsala 2009. It has also been presented at an ISD conference; see "Effects on software quality of early user-testing (testing before programming)" by Pettersson and Nilsson (2011) in the Publication list.
At I-USED’09 we presented the system development work flow and the error results with this figure and table: