Usability engineering of agile software project management tools

Abstract

The successful management of software projects requires taking human and managerial factors into consideration. Agile software project management methodologies have made their way into the mainstream culture of software development and have gotten the attention of software engineers and researchers due to their rapid growth. The aim of this research effort is to comprehensively evaluate the usability of four software project management tools based on experimental findings as well as heuristic assessment. We focus on evaluating widely known tools based on rigorous usability assessment criteria and subjective and objective evaluation techniques. By utilizing the capabilities of a usability testing software solution, Morea, and considering the subjective views of five Human Computer Interaction experts, we believe that our findings can inspire the design of more effective agile software project management tools that allow development teams to manage their work efficiently while helping decision makers to base their tool selection on a trusted usability evaluation approach that addresses the needs of software development teams. We also believe that our findings will have promising implications for task management activities performed throughout all the phases of the software development lifecycle.