CHI 2006 Special Interest Group on
Testing Interactive Software: A Challenge for Usability and Reliability

24 April 2006, Montreal, Canada

What's New

April 21, 2006: The web site has been set up.
April 24, 2006: Web site first update with information from the SIG.

Documents

The document describing the SIG that appears in the conference proceedings is available here. 

Attending the SIG

The SIG has been scheduled in room 515C in the convention centre where CHI 2006 is held.

Provisional Programme

Monday 24th of April 2006 (from 14.30 to 16.00) (slides here)

• Short introduction about the SIG (10 mn)
• Short presentations (20 mn)
  • Software engineering testing for reliability (Philippe)
  • Human reliabilty for interactive systems testing (Ron)
  • Incident and accident analysis and reporting for testing (Sandra)
  • HCI testing for usability (Regina)
• Gathering feedback from audience (10 mn)
• Presentation of some case studies (20 mn)
• Listing of issues and solutions for interactive systems testing (20 mn)
• Discussion and summary (10 mn)

List of participants

The SIG

CRecent years have seen an increasing use of sophisticated interaction techniques including in the field of safety critical interactive software [8]. The use of such techniques has been required in order to increase the bandwidth between the users and systems and thus to help them deal efficiently with increasingly complex systems. These techniques come from research and innovation done in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI). A significant effort is currently being undertaken by the HCI community in order to apply and extend current usability evaluation techniques to these new kinds of interaction techniques. However, very little has been done to improve the reliability of software offering these kinds of interaction techniques. Even testing basic graphical user interfaces remains a challenge that has rarely been addressed in the field of software engineering [9]. However, the non reliability of interactive software can jeopardize usability evaluation by showing unexpected or undesired behaviors. The aim of this SIG is to provide a forum for both researchers and practitioners interested in testing interactive software. Our goal is to define a roadmap of activities to cross fertilize usability and reliability testing of these kinds of systems to minimize duplicate efforts in both communities.

[8] M. Ould, R. Bastide, D. Navarre, P. Palanque, F. Rubio, A. Schyn. Multimodal and 3D Graphic Man- Machine Interfaces to Improve Operations. Eighth International Conference on Space Operations, Montréal, Canada, May 17 - 21, 2004.

[9] Memon A., Soffa M-L., Pollack M. Coverage criteria for GUI testing. Proceedings of the 8th European Software Engineering Conference Held Jointly with 9th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering. ACM Press (2001), 256 – 267

Sponsors

The SIG has been held under the auspices of the Research Training Network ADVISES

and under the auspices of the IFIP Working Group 13.5 on Human Error Safety and System Development