User Centered Method for Enhancing the Adoption of Software Systems in Palestine

Abstract

Software systems play major roles in improving people work and life quality. Developing countries as Palestine should adopt these systems to cope with the development and improve services provided to people. However, the adoption of software systems in Palestine has not reached the expectations because these systems may not fit with the Palestinian work environment. Software development methods influence the adoption of software systems, but the methods used in Palestine were mostly engineered for developed countries causing the produced software to be inadequate. Therefore, to determine which software method works better for Palestine, we studied existing systems and identified the factors influencing the acceptance of software systems. Based on these factors, we proposed a software development method that fits with end-user workflow and work environment to build usable software. We integrated three system development methods so that we can consolidate the advantages of each one and overcome their drawbacks. After that, we examined the usefulness of the proposed method empirically by developing real life software system. The research contributes to the software engineering field with an integrated software development method that focuses on users and usability for developing accepted software systems.