User Support Evaluation Team

Definition

User Support Evaluation Team

the team that performs a technical evaluation of the deliverable user support work products and the process used to produce them

Classification

As illustrated in the preceding figure, User Support Evaluation Team is part of the following inheritance hierarchy:

• Type: Concrete
• Superclass: Evaluation Team
• Subclasses:
  • None

Responsibilities

The typical team-specific responsibilities of a User Support Evaluation Team are to:

• Evaluate the deliverable user support work products.
• Notify the user support team of any defects found.
• Recommend improvements to the process regarding:
  • The user support activity, work flows, tasks, and techniques.
  • The standards, templates, and evaluation checklists for the deliverable user support work products.

The user support evaluation team typically inherits the common team responsibilities from the team method component.

Roles

The user support evaluation team typically consists of persons playing one or more of the following roles:

• Technical Leader, who facilitates the Evaluation meeting and evaluates the requirements work products for technical quality.
• System Architect, who evaluates the deliverable user support work products for conformance to the as built system.
• Usability Engineer, who evaluates the deliverable user support work products for usability.
• Technical Writer, who acts as scribe at the evaluation meeting, summarizes the evaluation team’s findings in the evaluation summary report, and delivers the report to the user support team.

Tasks

The user support evaluation team typically performs the following team-specific tasks in an iterative, incremental, parallel, and time-boxed manner:

• Quality Engineering:
  • Quality Control – User Support Evaluation
    Evaluate the user support work products
  • Quality Assurance – In-Progress Review
    Review the user support process regarding:
    • The user support activity, work flows, tasks, and techniques.
    • The standards, templates, and evaluation checklists for the user support work products.

The user support evaluation team typically inherits the common team tasks from the team method component.

Work Products

The user support evaluation team typically produces the following work products:

• Quality Set:
  • Evaluation Report, which documents an individual evaluateor’s findings.
  • Evaluation Summary Report, which summarizes the finding of the entire evaluation team.

Guidelines

• Evaluations should not devolve into walkthroughs. The work products should stand on their own and not require their authors to explain them.
• To the extent practical, the developers of a work product should:
  • Not be the only evaluators of it.
  • Also informally evaluate it prior to the evaluation.
• A single person may play multiple roles on an evaluation team if he or she has the necessary expertise to fulfill multiple roles. This is especially true on small projects.
• A user support evaluation team typically inherits the common team guidelines from the team method component.