CS610 Research Methods
Richard Halstead-Nussloch
Case Studies, Comparison Studies, Usability Testing,
and Software Quality Testing
Case Studies
- Definition/Information Goals
- Intensive analysis
- Individual unit
- Time scope
- Retrospective
- Prospective
- Importance
- Widely applied
- Often misused
Comparison Studies
- Definition/Information Goals
- Placing together two or more items or products
- Establish similarities and dissimilarities
- Comparison versus
- Case-Multiple units/Comp needs measurements
- Experiment-Products compared Vs. Parameters
- Importance
Usability Test
- Definition/Information Goals
- Case, comparison, quality test
- Involves measures and criteria of usability
- Importance
- If software or a product can not be used, it
is not useful
Software Quality Tests
- Involves both formal and empirical methods
- Definition/Information Goals
- Case, comparison, quality test
- Involves measures and criteria of code quality
- Often performed against requirements or standards
- Importance
- Enables iterative engineering of software
Code Behavior Studies
- Definition/Information Goals
- Case and comparison studies
- Expand knowledge of language/development environment
capabilities
- Can I/we do that in language X?
- Importance
- Enables using small prototypes to scale up to
large systems