A Study on an Agent Based Approach to Monitor the Application Feature Usage

Usability has gained a paramount significance in the recent trends of software application development. Application usage (AU) means the data, which consists of history of user interactions of an application. Knowledge of usage patterns in the AU is required for developing an application with rich features and that appeal to majority of users, with good usability. Monitoring the user interactions of an application for AU data is becoming a premier in recent days and this feature of aggregating the AU data is being added to good number of applications yet to be commissioned. But it is a major challenge to add this feature to the commissioned applications which are running successfully. It is also difficult to support the new applications with zero impact on the software engineering process. Legacy solutions for aggregating AU data are using the concepts of Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and Attribute programming. These approaches provide the high coupling between the modules/applications, which increases the dependency of one module/application on the other. These approaches impact the Non-functional requirements (NFR's) of an application. In case of products already released and running successfully at the customer deployments, it's almost impossible to go with legacy solutions. This paper addresses a technique to accumulate the AU data of an application, which can be used to find the usage patterns. This knowledge of usage patterns in AU data, there by helps in increasing the usability, achieving maintainability, retaining performance and offers flexibility to an application.