[Sigia-l] Usability Testing comments from Giga

[Nuno Lopes]

Hi,

Zyia,

>So is medicine, for instance. But could you imagine every doctor
testing
>every decision he makes on every patient?

If you perceive the problem unclearly you arrive to the wrong
assumption. The problem is not of testing ones decision, but of testing
functionality.

If the concept of architecture is perceived correctly, then one knows
that any is made of building blocks, one after the other. One of the
strategies used to reduce testing is by employing artifacts and concepts
that were previously tested successfully in a given context and problem
domain. Once the same or similar context or domain is found again one
can use the same strategy without fully testing its structure with
reasonably degree of assurance that it works.

One of the things to face not only the issue of testing and quality
assurance that steam from other disciplines where architecture was
concerned (Buildings Architecture) is the use of Patterns and
Anti-Patterns within the development of a system. The Software
Architecture field only in mid 90's  transposed this concept to
information/object modeling. Probably IA can use this rationale much
sooner then Software Architecture did (that would be move forward for
IA). Even today this concept it is used only by some experts in Software
Architecture just because this way of thinking is not engrailed within
the culture yet.

There are plenty of books about the subject that expose how this works
in generic terms (decoupled from a specific subject) that one can read.

I can provide with references to these studies and books if one feels
interested. These are things that work and don't really need to be
tested that much, as it had been applied to the development of
architectures in more then one field.

Best regards,

Nuno Lopes