The Focus on Usability in Testing Practices in Industry

A study exploring the focus on usability in testing practices in software development teams in Iceland using the agile software process Scrum is described in this paper. A survey was conducted to describe how testing is conducted and to what extent testing techniques are used. The results show that unit, integration, system and acceptance testing are the most frequent testing techniques used, but usability testing is not that common. Neither are alpha, beta, performance/load and security testing. Interviews were conducted to exemplify how practitioners conduct usability testing and what they describe as the difference between usability and acceptance testing. Some examples from the interviews show that practitioners are willing to do formal usability testing on extensive parts of the system, but because the iterations in Scrum are short and the changes to the system in each iteration are small, formal usability testing does not fit into the project work.