Investigating the impact of usability on software architecture through scenarios: A case study on Web systems

Usability has primarily been served by separating the user interface from the remainder of the application. However, several researchers have recently determined that there is a direct relationship between architectural decisions and usability requirements. This leads us to conclude that more attention should be devoted to usability driven architectural analysis methods. We present a case study that consists in adapting an existing software architecture analysis method (SAAM) for the purpose of deriving the interdependencies between architectural characteristics and usability requirements. More specifically, we investigate the impact of implementing usability requirement changes on the architecture. Potential design solutions that accommodate the corresponding usability mechanisms into the web software architecture are presented, along with their rational and the process by which they are obtained. We conclude by recommending how usability issues can be dealt with proactively during the design of the architecture and present the need to integrate those usability requirements in a software engineering process.