Towards engineering higher quality intelligent environments

This study is motivated by the need to engineer higher quality intelligent environments. Intelligent Environments possess certain unique characteristics and requirements compared to traditional information systems. Additionally, there is little guidance on how to manage and evaluate quality during their development. To address these concerns, this study has three main objectives. First, it proposes a novel quality-in-use model for evaluating intelligent environments according to their guiding principles. Second, it presents a quality enhanced version of the User Centred Intelligent Environment Development Process to manage quality during the development lifecycle. Third, we report on application of a multiple case study which investigated the effects of our proposed approaches to projects from three different contexts. We can say that quality is built into the systems by incorporating quality characteristics, from the ISO/IEC 25000 standards, with functional requirements. It was found that stakeholders collaborating with the project team are better able to define targets using measures from the quality standards. Quality metrics allowed developers to keep track of deviations from quality targets and fix problems early during development, enabling better evaluation of the application quality. The proposed quality-in-use model was found to be insightful in guiding the development of a system by offering a more objective perspective on the expected capabilities of the system. Stakeholders’ involvement during the entire process ensures that the delivered systems deliver the best value. However, the challenge is to shorten the development cycle so that feedback can be obtained early and regularly from them. It was also noted that there is a significant increase in number of system tests which could impact delivery time, budget and necessitates a highly experienced project team.