Software development Life cycle model to build software applications with usability

Software usability is one of the key quality attributes for the software application to improve the human interface with an effective utilization and accurate use. Lack of usability of the software application leads loss in terms of cost, reputation and trust. Lack of focus on software usability during its development increases the latent and patent flaws in the application. Usability feature cannot be added as additional at the end of the development process, but it needs to be paid attention throughout the development phases of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). In that view, this paper presents a new, Usability-Software Development Life Cycle model (U-SDLC) introducing usability development tasks and activities to be followed during the SDLC. This paper provides a set of activities/best practices for all stakeholders involved in the planning, architecting, coding, testing and maintaining software applications. This paper also presents with a comparative study done on existing SDLC model and concludes that the present models are not adequately focusing usability issues while building effective, usable software products and proves with statistical results that the proposed new SDLC model is capable of building usable application.