Usability and reliability analysis and improvement for web based systems

In this competitive age, software quality assurance is an inevitable part of any software product. Building and ensuring reliable and easy-to-use Web and service based applications are also becoming increasingly important for Web hosts and service providers.;In this study, we first address defect classification and analysis for Web quality improvement. We propose and construct a usability problem classification and analysis framework by integrating usability practices with ODC framework to improve usability during the whole process. With this framework, the cause-effect classification and analysis can be performed for usability problems. Meanwhile, HCI activities and software process can be improved together.;Further, we focus on two important quality attributes: usability and reliability. For Web usability improvement, we propose to identify navigation usability problems by comparing actual and anticipated usage patterns. With an experiment on a small service-oriented website, we provide an initial validation of the applicability and effectiveness of our method. The strategy of risk-based testing we proposed for Web reliability improvement is applied into more diverse web applications, which shows risk-based testing can maximize testing efficiency and effectiveness, and produce more accurate reliability analysis and estimations.;Finally, we developed a comprehensive and integrated tool suite to support our strategy for assessing and improving the quality of Web and service-based applications.