December Computer Chapter Meeting Report By Barbara Bancroft bbancroft@ccsnh.ed

The catchy title of the talk “Software Evolution: Usability, Life and Death in an Impatient World” appealed to present day developers and UI designers. Greg Stout discussed challenges that face today’s developers. We examined how easy it is to fall behind on the schedule or miss the requirements target all together. This topic dovetailed well with Nita Patel’s talk in November which examined software planning tools. We visited the Water Fall model followed by examining Agile Development model and finally we heard about a potential new User Centered Development model.

Greg stressed the need to keep the user in the loop during development cycle. We need to focus clearly on the problem and make sure that we do not lose sight of who is the user and what his or her needs are. Software must be first of all usable and intuitive. It must be consistent. Software must also be forgiving. User should be able to make mistakes and go back and corrected them without drastic consequences. One of the most important features of a good UI is consistency. All pages should have unified look and functionality.

Greg Stout delivering his very dynamic presentation. Another interesting concept raised in the seminar was bringing a documentation team early in the process. By having another way to communicate details of the projects we have another avenue of specifying requirements. Engineers often do not like to document software and sometimes are too close to the code to document it effectively. Without documentation user may not be aware of how features work. Once documentation team makes clear specifications both users and engineers can communicate more effectively.

SNHU and NCC Students listening to the presentation.

Overall a topic of how to produce more flexible and user friendly software is emerging as one of the problems that need to be solved in the next few years. The last few seminars have presented it as a current problem. We are searching for a solution to this problem and experimenting with several approaches. Chances are that our graduates will be working on this problem in their first job.