Hot off the presses, and just in time for the holidays:
The full report is available at:
<http://csdl.ics.hawaii.edu/techreports/07-02/07-02.html>
The abstract follows:
This report presents the results from a classroom evaluation of Hackystat by ICS 413 and
ICS 613 students at the end of Fall, 2006. The students had used Hackystat-UH for
approximately six weeks at the time of the evaluation. The survey requests their
feedback regarding the installation, configuration, overhead of use, usability, utility,
and future use of the Hackystat-UH configuration. This classroom evaluation is a
semi-replication of an evaluation performed on Hackystat by ICS 413 and 613 students at
the end of Fall, 2003, which is reported in Results from the 2003 Classroom Evaluation of
Hackystat-UH. As the Hackystat system has changed significantly since 2003, some of the
evaluation questions were changed.
The data from this evaluation, in combination with the data from the 2003 evaluation,
provides an interesting perspective on the past, present, and possible future of
Hackystat. Hackystat has increased significantly in functionality since 2003, which has
enabled the 2006 classroom usage to more closely reflect industrial application, and
which has resulted in significantly less overhead with respect to client-side
installation. On the other hand, results appear to indicate that this increase in
functionality has resulted in a decrease in the usability and utility of the system,
primarily due to inadequacies in the server-side user interface. Based upon the data,
this report proposes a set of user interface enhancements to address the problems raised
by the students, including Ajax-based menus and parameters, workflow based organization
of the user interface, real-time display for ongoing project monitoring, annotations, and
simplified data exploration facilities.
Cheers,
Philip
