Context: Critical software systems developed for the government continue to be of lower quality than expected, despite extensive literature describing best practices in software engineering. Goal: We wanted to better understand the extent of certain issues in the field and the relationship to software quality. Method: We surveyed fifty software development professionals and asked about practices and barriers in the field and the resulting software quality. Results: There is evidence of certain problematic issues for developers and specific quality characteristics that seem to be affected. Conclusions: This motivates future work to address the most problematic barriers and issues impacting software quality.

This paper presents the Heuristic Quality Scale (HQS), an instrument designed to assess the quality of a published heuristic set. The purpose of this instrument is 2-fold: first, to aid the evaluator in selecting between prospective specialized heuristic sets for a given evaluation; second, to suggest considerations and guidelines for the creation and publication of new heuristic sets. The HQS was developed over a series of studies evaluating and refining iterations of the instrument while also polling the user experience community at large to identify which factors truly predict the quality of a particular set of heuristics. The contribution of the HQS is that it is a low-cost heuristic evaluation (HE) to apply to heuristic sets themselves. It produces a reliable subjective measure of the quality of a heuristic set and helps the usability professional rank and compare competing options for conducting HEs.

For information workers, maintaining high productivity relies on timely task resumption after interruptions, which are frequent. However, people's task resumption ability is compromised by disruptive environments and human cognitive limitations. We propose that a helpful intervention is to provide visual feedback about the duration of a suspended task. Results from a controlled study show significantly shorter average off-task time by adding visual feedback. Further, using emotionally attachable visual objects in the visualization has the additional benefit of decreasing off-task time without increasing stress. Punishment-oriented persuasion strategies produced faster resumption, but also caused higher stress levels. Combined with other related results, we discuss the implications for design as well directions for future study.

Nowadays instant messaging (IM) is getting very common in everyday life especially in casual contexts. Studying emotional communication in this channel is still growing. The main focus of this study is how four emotional states (relaxed, angry, happy, sad) influence the type and quantity of emotion-related cues used during informal conversations between college friends in IM. Results of the analysis revealed that the happy condition led to more use of nonverbal cues than the other three conditions, including more punctuation, vocal spellings, lexical surrogates, and minus features. Understanding how emotions affect emotional cues users apply in IM has implications for future research on emotion communication via CMC, as well as for the design of the next generation of IM tools that can facilitate communicating those emotional cues.