Preparing Usability Supporting Architectural Patterns for Industrial Use

Usability supporting architectural patterns (USAPs) have been shown to provide developers with useful guidance for producing a software architecture design that supports usability in a laboratory setting (7). In close collaboration between researchers and software developers in the real world, the concepts were proven useful (2). However, this process does not scale to industrial development efforts. In particular, development teams need to be able to use USAPs while being distributed world-wide. USAPs also must support legacy or already partially-designed architectures, and when using multiple USAPs there could be a potentially overwhelming amount of information given to the software architects. In this paper, we describe the restructuring of USAPs using a pattern language to simplify the development and use of multiple USAPs. We also describe a delivery mechanism that is suitable for industrial-scale adoption of USAPs. The delivery mechanism involves organizing responsibilities into a hierarchy, utilizing a checklist to ensure responsibilities have been considered, and grouping responsibilities in a fashion that both supports use of multiple USAPs simultaneously and also points out reuse possibilities to the architect.