IBM Rational Software.
My encounter and interaction with "Usability"
What is important for successful Software? During the early days of development, UNIX was our real favorite. As a Unix user and more than that, a developer of compilation system, writing the filters on the command line, using "find" command or even ":" command of "vi", etc. was a way of life. I’m not sure what made us more comfortable - whether it was the functionality of Unix or was it the way OS/file-system usability extended to the OS-user. During this period a few Windows-based development environments started appearing; one of the early ones was UCSD Pascal. Later there were many more. But my real next interaction with Usability was through Rational Apex. As a user and the developer of Rational Apex, it was a great experience with usability. In the 90's this X/Motif based Integrated Development Environment considered most of the aspects of human related factors. Consistency in user interface, customizability and easy access, made it much ahead of the IDEs of that time. Consideration of different types of users gave one an advantage; one of the simple examples being how the user can architect his system using the IDE. To conclude, Usability testing starts at the architecture level. Any software application, unless well architected from different angles will face Usability issues. Usability Testing, which is practiced as more of black box testing, not only checks for consistency of the Software Application, but more importantly reveals the Software Architecture and finds how gracefully an application responds to different user requests.
Vivek has 20+ years of experience in the software industry, out of which 14 years are in software development at different levels. He has been with IBM Rational since 1994, initially as a part of the development team. From the year 2000 he has started working as a part of the field team. He has worked on IBM Rational Apex Ada development environment and Compilation System. He considers Rational Apex as his first real interaction with Usability. As a part of field team he is currently working with many Rational customers to develop tools that support testing initiatives. Apart from technical consulting and training on architecting, developing and testing of software applications, he has special interest in "Principles of Software Testing" and Java Security. His interest in testing has helped him analyze, teach and practice user and exploratory testing.