Preliminary Evaluation of a Guided Usability Defect Report Form

Open source software development projects typically use generic defect reporting forms, such as BugZilla and Jira, even for specialized kinds of defects such as usability issues. These issues typically tend to be reported as unstructured text, mix multiple defect attributes, lack precise cause, and overlook emotional impact on users. The poor quality of these defect reports impacts on the ability of developers to address them efficiently and effectively. In this paper, we describe a novel guided defect reporting method for capturing usability defects. We evaluate our approach using an expert judgment approach where experienced developers and researchers evaluate the clarity of usability defects reported via conventional defect reporting tools and our method. Our results show this is a promising approach at capturing more clear usability defect descriptions.