Dimmel, F. (2008). Usability-enhanced agile development of Web-based applications [Diploma Thesis, Technische Universität Wien]. reposiTUm. https://resolver.obvsg.at/urn:nbn:at:at-ubtuw:1-26937
Usability; Agile Softwareentwicklung; Rich Internet Applications
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Usability; Agile Development; Rich Internet Applications
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Abstract:
During the past few years the author has been working at Siemens as a working student with a part-time employment. He worked within the "Support Center for Components & Internet Technology" group, which was responsible to stay up-todate with modern Internet technologies and be technical leader for web trends. A certain part of the daily work was to examine new technologies, programming languages and hypes, building know-how and implement prototypes for demonstration purposes.<br />The past years brought lots of new technologies to the web, which finally was called Web 2.0, because of new possibilities for users and developers.<br />One of the latest trends is the use of Rich Internet Applications, which add new functionality to browser-based applications and integrate the efficient usage of rich data sets.<br />Also the integration of rich media and multimedia items is a central, new opportunity since the introduction of Rich Internet Applications.<br />Many different start-ups evolved and they built user-centric web-applications.<br />Sometimes different sites had the same idea, but only a few grew to huge websites.<br />Because these sites were done by start-ups, which weren't able to put millions of dollars into marketing, there must be another cause, why some sites were successful and some weren't. One of the important differences to other sites was most likely usability. Usability for web sites is more and more important when the website's purpose is the integration of the user and his participation.<br />Different guidelines are available for usability, but most of them are very old.<br />It's important to adapt these guidelines for modern web applications, and finally Rich Internet Applications.<br />The author of this thesis selected the topic, because of his interests in web applications, usability and agile development. Also his Bachelor thesis was about "Rich Internet Applications and Service Oriented Architectures"; the thesis at hand dives into a more detailed description of how to implement such applications in terms of better usability and the development process using Agile Methods.