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The metaphor of Technical Debt (TD) has generated a conceptual framework on factors that weaken the quality of software and accumulate a repair cost. However, user-related aspects like user experience (UX) receive little consideration among TD types, for reasons like the substantial focus on code TD, some dynamics inherent to agile processes, and an apparent lack of cumulative cost over time. This article has two main goals: first, to present evidence of the existence of UXDebt as a type of TD, with a cumulative cost for the development team as well as stakeholders; second, to propose a definition and characterization of UXDebt that may serve as a frame for further research on methods and tools for continuous management within agile processes. For the first goal, we have compiled evidence on the current state of UXDebt from three sources: a literature review, a survey among software engineering professionals in agile teams, and the analysis of UX issues in GitHub. All sources have evidenced some form of UXDebt; surveyed practitioners have recognized its poor management with a cost for the entire team that accumulates over time. Moreover, issue-tracking systems allow to visualize and measure a technical form of UXDebt. For the second goal, we have defined a conceptual model that characterizes UXDebt in terms of both technical and non-technical aspects. On the technical side, we propose the notion of UX smells which allows us to discuss concrete management activities.

The product of good design should render a tool invisible for a user who is executing a task. Unfortunately, web applications are often far from invisible to users, who struggle with poor design of websites and processes in them. We are particularly interested in web processes that involve form filling, so we have been studying how people interact with web forms. Besides cataloguing user interaction problems that are common in web forms, we have noticed that, in many cases, there is a single form element or widget to blame for a certain interaction problem, because such widget is not the most appropriate one for the required input in that particular context. This unfitness of the widget causes an extra burden to the user, which we call interaction effort. In this work we propose measuring the interaction effort of a widget with a unified score based on micro-measures automatically captured from interaction logs. We present the micromeasures that were found relevant to predict the interaction effort in 6 different types of web forms widgets. We describe a large data collection process and prediction models, showing that it is indeed possible to automatically predict a widget interaction effort score by learning from expert human ratings. We consequently believe that the interaction effort could be used as an effective metric to compare small variations in a design in terms of user experience.

Cuando inició el ciclo lectivo 2020 los docentes teníamos aprobadas nuestras planificaciones diseñadas en torno al aula presencial, sin embargo, podríamos decir que, el Covid hackeo el sistema y nos puso a todos, independientemente del nivel educativo en el que enseñáramos, en una situación de virtualidad y en muchos casos de vulnerabilidad. En este trabajo se presentan las estrategias pedagógicas y el diseño curricular de la materia de grado “Bases de Datos 1”, de la Facultad de Informática de la UNLP, implementados durante esta coyuntura. Para ello, se abordan temáticas como uso de Plataformas, Aula Virtual Invertida, Aprendizaje Colaborativo y Aprendizaje Basado en Juegos. Durante el curso se desarrollaron encuestas y sondeos con los cursantes, con el objetivo de relevar sus necesidades, percepciones respecto a las propuestas y sugerencias para implementar mejoras que propiciaran su Aprendizaje Significativo y la apropiación de los conocimientos. En base a la información relevada, se espera abrir un espacio de debate con otros docentes, acerca de cómo estas nuevas prácticas adoptadas durante la no presencialidad, pueden sumarse a la planificación a futuro más allá del regreso físico a las aulas y para discutir acerca de la “nueva normalidad”, al menos en la Educación Superior., When the 2020 school year began, teachers had already approved educational planning designed around the face- to-face classroom, however, we could say that the Covid hacked the system and put us all, regardless of the educational level at which we teach, in a situation of virtuality and in many cases of vulnerability. This paper presents the pedagogical strategies and the curricular design of an undergraduate course on "Databases 1", from the “Facultad de Informática” of the UNLP implemented during this context. For this, topics such as the use of Platforms in Education, Inverted Virtual Classroom, Collaborative Learning and Game-Based Learning are addressed. During the course, surveys and opinion poll were carried out with the students, with the aim of assessing their needs, perceptions regarding the proposals that were presented and suggestions to propose improvements that would promote meaningful learning and the appropriation of knowledge by the students. themselves. Based on the information gathered, it is expected to open a space for debate with other teachers about how these new practices, adopted during the absence of the face-to-face- classroom, can be added to future planning beyond the physical return to classrooms to discuss about the "new normality" almost on Higher Education., Facultad de Informática

With the aim of pushing innovation through information and communication technology in the agri-business field, working closely with farmers is essential. It is especially important to systematically capture their knowledge in order to analyze, propose and design innovation artifacts (in terms of software applications). In this article, we use Scenarios to capture the knowledge of the experts that is elicited in early meetings previous to the definition of requirements. At those early stages, there are many uncertainties, and we are particularly interested in decision support. Thus, we propose an extension of the Scenarios for dealing with uncertainties. Scenarios are described in natural language, and it is very important to have an unbiased vocabulary. We complement Scenarios with a specific glossary, the Language Extended Lexicon that is also extended to decision support. According to V-model life cycle, every stage has a testing related stage. Thus, we also propose a set of rules to derive tests from the Scenarios. Summing up, we propose (i) an extension to Scenarios and the Language Extended Lexicon templates, (ii) a set of rules to derive tests, and (iii) an application to support the proposed technique. We have applied the proposed approach in a couple of case studies and we are confident that the results are promising. Nevertheless, we need to perform a further exhaustive validation. Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada

Usability and user interaction improvement is a central task in web development to guarantee the success of a web application. However, designers are barely able to keep up with the current development cycle because their practices are too costly, while interaction issues accumulate in applications that end-users keep suffering. In this work, we propose a method for designers to rapidly explore solutions through visual programming to the interaction problems of an application under development, even when it has been already deployed. The method is realized by a tool called UX-Painter, an exploratory tool for designers to apply quick fixes to interaction issues at the client-side of a web application without the need of any script programming knowledge. The palette of available fixes in UX-Painter are client-side web refactorings, i.e., changes to web page elements that solve specific user interaction problems without changing the underlying functionality. UX-Painter allows designers to quickly set up new versions of a web application by combining refactorings to create alternative designs for user testing or an inspection review. UX-Painter also provides the means to communicate design improvements, as a sequence of refactorings with clear semantics. We show the feedback provided by interviews with designers about UX-Painter's functionality and the results of a user test about its usability.

This paper presents a flexible web authoring tool called MoLE for teachers to build their own mobile learning experiences. MoLE allows teachers to define learning activities (set of learning tasks within a workflow) that can be accessed from a mobile learning application. Through MoLE, the reuse of learning tasks and learning activities is favored so that a community of teachers can co-create activities and share them. Additionally we present an evaluation of it in order to assess the usability of the tool for users with different backgrounds.

Usability evaluation is an essential task in web application development. There have been several attempts to integrate user-centered design with agile methods, but it is hard to synchronize their practices. User testing is very valuable to learn from feedback of actual use, but it remains expensive to find and solve usability problems. Furthermore, the high cost of usability evaluation forces small/medium-sized companies to trust the first solution applied, without actually testing the success of the solution or considering a possible regression in usability, as could be highlighted by an iterative testing method. In this article we advocate for a usability improvement cycle oriented by user feedback, and compatible with an agile development process. We propose an iterative method supported by a toolkit that allows usability experts to design user tests, run them remotely, analyze results, and assess alternative solutions to usability problems similarly to A/B testing. Each solution is created by applying client-side web refactorings, i.e., changes to the web pages in the client which are meant to improve usability. The main benefit of our approach is that it reduces the overall cost of user testing and particularly, A/B testing, by applying refactorings to create alternative solutions without modifying the application’s server code. By making it affordable for usability experts to apply the method in parallel with the development cycle, we aim to encourage them to incorporate user feedback and try different ideas to discover the best performing solution in terms of the metrics of interest., Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada

The design of tests is a very important step in the software development process since it allows us to match the users’ expectations with the finished product. Considered as a cumbersome activity, efforts have been made to automatize and alleviate the burden of test generation, but it is still a largely neglected step. We propose taking advantage of existing requirement artifacts, like Scenarios that describe the dynamic of the domain in a very early stage of software development, to obtain tests from them. In particular, the approach proposed complement the Scenarios that are textually described with a glossary, the Language Extended Lexicon. Thus, a set of rules to derive tests from Scenarios is also proposed. The tests are then described using the Task/Method model. The main findings of this work consist of an extension of a previously presented set of rules. And a tool based on a media wiki platform that makes possible to record Scenarios and the Language Extended Lexicon and implement the rules to obtain the tests. The main originality of this work is the glossary which complements Scenarios, the semantic support to obtain tests and the tool to automatize the approach., Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada

International audience; In this paper we present a user experience report on a Group Decision Support System. The used system is a Collaborative framework called GRoUp Support (GRUS). The experience consists in three user tests conducted in three different countries. While the locations are different, all three tests were run in the same conditions: same facilitator and tested process. In order to support the end-users. we teach the system in two different ways: a presentation of the system, and a video demonstrating how to use it. The main feedback of this experience is that the teaching step for using Collaborative tools in mandatory. The experience was conducted in the context of decision-making in the agriculture domain.

Automating usability diagnosis and repair can be a powerful assistance to usability experts and even less knowledgeable developers. To accomplish this goal, evaluating user interaction automatically is crucial, and it has been broadly explored. However, most works focus in long interaction sessions, which makes it difficult to tell how individual interface components influence usability. In contrast, this work aims to compare how different widgets perform for a same task, in the context of evaluating alternative designs for small components, implemented as refactorings. For this purpose, we propose a unified score to compare the widgets involved in each refactoring by the level of effort required by users to interact with them. This score is based on micro-measures automatically captured from interaction logs, so it can be automatically predicted. We show the results of predicting such score using decision trees.

In modern software development, much time is devoted and much attention is paid to the activity of data modeling and the translation of data models into databases. This has motivated the proposal of different approaches and tools to support this activity, such as semiautomatic approaches that generate data models from requirements artifacts using text analysis and sets of heuristics, among other techniques. However, these approaches still suffer from important limitations, including the lack of support for requirements traceability, the poor support for detecting and solving conflicts in domain-specific requirements, and the considerable effort required for manually checking the generated models. This paper introduces DataMock, an Agile approach that enables the iterative building of data models from requirements specifications, while supporting traceability and allowing inconsistencies detection in data requirements and specifications. The paper also describes how the approach effectively allows improving traceability and reducing errors and effort to build data models in comparison with traditional, state-of-the-art, data modeling approaches., Laboratorio de Investigación y Formación en Informática Avanzada

This paper presents an analysis of the challenges present in the design of a location-based mobile learning application. The analysis was performed on a customization of the application "Resuelvo Explorando" for the thematic of "Healthy Eating". Considering the relevance of usability in this type of applications, a usability analysis is presented using a heuristic method. With this work, we expect to contribute in the discussion regarding good practices to address the challenges present in this type of applications from the design stage.

Client-Side Web Refactorings (CSWRs) allow improving interaction aspects of web applications by applying changes to the user interface without altering the code base, even in production settings. However, developers are not always willing, or even allowed to apply external adaptations to their applications’ user interface. Besides, CSWRs do not guarantee improvements in all contexts, so it may be unwise to install them in a production version. We propose a tool that allows creating private versions of a running web application almost automatically. Using this tool, developers or usability experts can easily combine CSWRs to create alternative versions of web applications, without the need of creating a cloned sandbox environment for each version. This yields many uses, such as quickly setting up user tests, showing live alternatives to Product Owners, and even performing A/B testing. The tool is built on top of Kobold, a service that allows applying CSWRs to fix usability smells. Kobold with versioning is available at: https://autorefactoring.lifia.info.unlp.edu.ar. A screencast of the tool is available at https://youtu.be/LVc3BOtVP3I.

La usabilidad en las aplicaciones web es un aspecto fundamental, pero en muchos casos relegado por diferentes motivos como la falta de personal experimentado, o los altos costos. Si bien las grandes compañías suelen estar preparadas para dedicar los recursos necesarios a mejorar la usabilidad de sus aplicaciones, las pequeñas y medianas suelen utilizarlos en otros aspectos. Para ayudar a bajar estos costos, han surgido herramientas que definición y ejecución remota de pruebas de usabilidad, o recolección de estadísticas de forma automatizada, pero igualmente se requiere de expertos que diseñen las pruebas, interpreten los reportes o visualizaciones en busca de problemas, y diseñen soluciones a los mismos, que los desarrolladores deberán implementar. En este trabajo se propone un enfoque para hallar problemas de usabilidad automáticamente en aplicaciones web, basados en el análisis de eventos de interacción de usuarios finales. Para cada uno de estos problemas de usabilidad encontrados, existe además una solución que puede sugerirse para resolver el problema. En algunos casos, es incluso posible aplicar estas soluciones automáticamente. En este enfoque, los problemas de usabilidad se definen como “usability smells” y las soluciones como “usability refactorings”, ambos términos adaptados de la jerga del refactoring de código. Los usability smells, en este contexto, son problemas que afectan la interacción por parte de los usuarios finales, mientras que los usability refactorings son transformaciones que aplican soluciones documentadas para resolver esos problemas. Como prueba de concepto se implementó Kobold: una herramienta capaz de realizar todo lo que se propone en este trabajo. La herramienta funciona como un servicio (SaaS – Software as a Service), y no requiere de casi ningún esfuerzo de instalación. Al incorporar Kobold en una aplicación web, se comienza a capturar la interacción de los usuarios, y los reportes de problemas se muestran apenas un número suficiente de usuarios se topa con los mismos. Como los usability smells son problemas bien descritos, pueden ser interpretados por cualquier desarrollador, aunque no tenga experiencia en usabilidad. De la misma forma, los refactorings que se sugieren como solución pueden ser aplicados automáticamente y en producción, gracias a la implementación de refactorings del lado del cliente, que permiten alterar la aplicación sin modificar su código. De esta manera, Kobold se presenta como una herramienta que puede resultar de utilidad tanto para desarrolladores como para expertos en usabilidad. En resumen, lo que se quiere obtener con Kobold es, como mínimo, una herramienta confiable que con un mínimo esfuerzo de configuración pueda rápidamente comenzar a brindar asesoramiento sobre usabilidad en aplicaciones que ya se encuentran corriendo en producción, y que pueda ser configurada para detectar diferentes tipos de problemas. La audiencia para esta herramienta sería de desarrolladores con experiencia en usabilidad, que quisieran tener un panorama rápido de las interacciones reales que realiza la masa de usuario, y probablemente reparar rápidamente algunos de estos problemas del lado del cliente. Más aun, esto allanaría el camino para conseguir un objetivo más ambicioso: un mecanismo confiable que permita la auto-reparación de aplicaciones web, que incluso los desarrolladores sin experiencia en usabilidad puedan utilizar para corregir los usability smells en sus aplicaciones. El trabajo presentado incluye validaciones empíricas que comprueban la factibilidad del enfoque y su implementación en todas las etapas: captura de eventos de interacción, detección de usability smells y aplicación de usability refactorings., Facultad de Informática

Decision Support Systems (DSS) help users make decisions by organizing the decision-making process in stages, dealing with several input sources. In the agricultural context, these tools are becoming more important given the variety of data that producers face, market regulations and interaction of several actors with different backgrounds. Different DSS have existed for years, but their adoption is reportedly very low, being poor usability one of the most relevant factors. While there are surveys indicating this, we have not found usability evaluations on DSS with concrete results. In this work, we evaluated decision-making in the agricultural domain using a group DSS called GRUS. We present 3 different usability evaluations: a heuristic evaluation, a user test, and an automated diagnosis.