Østfold University College, represented by Mobile Applications Group member Rune Winther, will participate in the organization of the International Symposium of Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE) 2007. The conference, which is arranged annually, will in 2007 be arranged in Trollhättan, Sweden. The other local organizing organisations are University West in Trollhättan and Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) in Halden, Norway. The ISSRE conference is only organized outside the US every third year, so we’re lucky to have this conference in our own “backyard” next year. The conference will be held 5.-9. November.

About the conference (from the steering committee’s web-page): “The International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE) focuses on the practice and theory of software systems reliability engineering and analytics. The scope ranges from techniques and practices to verify, validate and test software, to those needed to estimate and predict its reliability, availability and dependability, to those that make it more tolerant to faults and (unexpected) changes in operating conditions, to the impact different development methods and processes have on the field reliability of a software-based product.” More information can be found at the steering committee’s web-pages.

The Okapi:Ranger application is based around collaboration and user-generated content, so naturally, I wanted to get me some users to test it. Since the case I’ve been working on involves wheelchair users, it was very pleasing to meet two such people that were very open and enthusiastic about testing my prototype.

The test itself was intended to be a ’street test’ where the users would follow the routes given them by the Ranger and then offer feedback to these routes depending on whether the routes were any good or not. Sadly, on the day of the test, the wether-gods had decided on rain and high winds. Instead of rolling around the cold and rain, we gathered at a local café and I showed the users my application and had them experiment with to see what they thought.

As I mentioned earlier, the people involved in this test were very open and enthusiastic, and they quickly discovered a multitude of things I could improve on. The almost two hour long session resulted in my notebook being brim-full of suggestions, critiques, and ideas about future functionality. I wonder how many other developers get to have such resourcefull testers?