Integrating Field Studies in Agile Development to Evaluate Usability on Context Dependant Mobile Applications

Agile development is a current trend in Software Engineering which is encouraged by the special needs of interactive systems that require incorporating usability engineering in their development processes. In this regard, how usability assessment of mobile interactive applications should be conducted in the frame of agile methodologies is an open question. On the one hand, usability evaluation consumes time and resources, which can make agile methodologies lose their agile essence. On the other hand, there is a considerable debate about whether user interactions with mobile systems should be investigated in the field or in more traditional laboratory environments. This paper presents the results of a field study conducted in an interactive context-dependant mobile application. This study allowed detecting different interaction patterns and contextual factors that are difficult or impossible to simulate in laboratory. The way and timing in which evaluations were performed were carefully considered to optimize the cost in time and resources. The integration of field evaluations in agile processes, as the one here presented, is consistent with the objective of improving product quality through incremental assessments.