Incorporating Behavioral Techniques Into the Systems Development Life Cycle

The gathering of a variety of human-oriented information is vital in the development stages of a software system. This information can be applied at a given stage to improve the human-computer interface of the software product. To reflect this, new categories of design and/or development effort need to be added tot he traditional systems development stages. These efforts, termed user factor stages, differ from the traditional feasibility studies, requirements analyses, and tests that are currently conducted. The stages offer a flexible series of techniques, which can be compared and contrasted in terms of their expected information benefit, cost, and reliability of data obtained. As a concrete example, the development of a forms interface to a relational database management system illustrates these techniques.