JOURNAL OF SOFTWARE ENGINEERING & INTELLIGENT SYSTEMS ISSN 2518-8739 31 st December 2018, Volume 3, Issue 3, JSEIS, CAOMEI Copyright © 2016-2018 www.jseis.org Corresponding Author: Saad Masood Butt 245 Email Address: saadmasoodbutt444@gmail.com USABILITY FRAMEWORK IN AGILE SOFTWARE PROCESSES 1 SAAD MASOOD BUTT, 2 GNEVASHEVA VERA ANATOLYEVNA, 3 SHAZIA ZAHEER 1 Atlantic International University, USA 2 MGIMO Uni, Moscow, Russia, Institute of socio-political research RAS 3 College of Science & Arts, Najran University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Email: 1 saadmasoodbutt444@gmail.com, 2 vera_cos@rambler.ru, 3 shaziazaheer_17@yahoo.com ABSTRACT Software development field is becoming more productive day by day with the wonderful model name Agile. Agile is the main focus of research now a days. It is because of its abilities of handling changes in efficient way through iterative and incremental practices. Although it became famous because of its capabilities still there are some issues in it, which is ignorance of usability engineering in different phases of agile that is an important aspect to understand the software. Usability has deep roots in software quality and is a core construct of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). To develop interactive and usable systems there is a need of such a model which can integrate HCI with Agile. To address this issue, we have proposed a model which will work with both User Centered (main focus of HCI) and Agile by assembling different practices from both fields which will result in useable products. It will enhance software life with user satisfaction by giving them running software with usability. Keywords : agile methodology; usability engineering; human computer interaction; user centered; UCAM; CASI; 1. INTRODUCTION Growing importance of software in daily lives of people have increased the need of such approach which can deliver product in short time along the ability to handle changes [1] [10] [11]. Software production must be iterative otherwise it will be hard or complex to handle [9]. Traditionally there were different models with different advantages for developing software but because of rapid changes in our society, Agile has taken place all of them because of its nature of giving warm welcome to changes [2]. instead of having different abilities, still there are some issues present in Agile too, that is developers focus on core functionalities only and ignorance of the main subject name HCI and interface design which is necessary to understand the whole project [2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. Different systems are developed which are accurate in functionalities but not easy to use for nontechnical users and led to failure. Only the usability can prevent the system from failure by giving deep understanding of users and their goals toward product in effective way, but the question (RQ1) here is how to integrate these two areas of software engineering and usability engineering to produce a quality and usable product? Many authors have tried to solve this issue. Agile promise for working piece of code but it is not sure about usability. Another question (RQ2) is will the proposed model solve the existing problems? To resolve the issue of usability we have proposed a model in our paper which is UCAM (User Centered Agile Model) using HCI practices with Agile to achieve usability. This method will integrate both fields in effective way. The idea of UC (User centered) is difficult to implement because of low priority given to usability [12] in agile. The Coaching method and CASI will used in proposed model to address this problem. At the end we have validated our model through case study that shows usable results. 1.1 Problem statment Many software’s led towards failure because of lack of awareness about usability. Agile can produce working piece of software but it cannot provide interactive and understand-able interfaces which brings difficulties for non-technical users. Some corporations still focus solely on the usability analysis at the end of development instead of following a user-centered approach from the beginning. Lack of usability, late interaction with usability, complex interfaces, is probably the main reason leading towards the failure in achievement of usability. To remove these barriers from the way of success we will incorporate usability with agile through integrated framework. Academic Editor: Muhammad Imran Babar, APCOMS, Pakistan Published: 31 st December, 2018 Funding: The author has no funds. Article Type: Research Article