422 Obstacles for the Integration of HCI Practices into Software Engineering Development Processes Xavier Ferre Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain Natalia Juristo Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain Ana M. Moreno Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain Copyright © 2006, Idea Group Inc., distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI is prohibited. INTRODUCTION Usability has become a critical quality factor in software systems, and it has been receiving increas- ing attention over the last few years in the SE (software engineering) field. HCI techniques aim to increase the usability level of the final software product, but they are applied sparingly in mainstream software development, because there is very little knowledge about their existence and about how they can contribute to the activities already performed in the development process. There is a perception in the software development community that these usability-related techniques are to be applied only for the development of the visible part of the UI (user interface) after the most important part of the software system (the internals) has been designed and implemented. Nevertheless, the different paths taken by HCI and SE regarding software development have re- cently started to converge. First, we have noted that HCI methods are being described more formally in the direction of SE software process descriptions. Second, usability is becoming an important issue on the SE agenda, since the software products user base is ever increasing and the degree of user computer literacy is decreasing, leading to a greater demand for usability improvements in the software market. However, the convergence of HCI and SE has uncovered the need for an integration of the practices of both disciplines. This integration is a must for the development of highly usable systems. In the next two sections, we will look at how the SE field has viewed usability. Following upon this, we address the existing approaches to integration. We will then detail the pending issues that stand in the way of successful integration efforts, concluding with the presentation of an approach that might be successful in the integration endeavor. Traditional View of Usability in Software Engineering Even though usability was mentioned as a quality attribute in early software quality taxonomies (Boehm, 1978; McCall, Richards, & Walters, 1977), it has traditionally received less attention than other quality attributes like correctness, reliability, or effi- ciency. While the development team alone could deal with these attributes, a strong interaction with users is required to cater for usability. With SE’s aim of making the development a systematic process, the human-induced unpredictability was to be avoided at all costs, thus reducing the interaction with users to a minimum. The traditional relegation of usability in SE can be acknowledged by observing how interaction design is marginally present in the main software develop- ment process standards: ISO/IEC Std. 12207 (1995) and IEEE Std. 1074 (1997). The ISO 12207 standard does not mention usability and HCI activities di- rectly. It says that possible user involvement should be planned, but this involvement is circumscribed to requirements setting exercises, prototype demon-