Case studies on analyzing software architectures for usability

Studies of software engineering projects reveal that a large number of usability related change requests are made after its deployment. Fixing certain usability problems during the later stages of development has proven to be costly, since some of these changes require changes to the software architecture i.e. this often requires large parts of code to be completely rewritten. Explicit evaluation of usability during architectural design may reduce the risk of building a system that fails to meet its usability requirements and may prevent high costs incurring adaptive maintenance activities once the system has been implemented. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of a scenario based architecture analysis technique for usability we developed, at two case studies.