A Case Study of Usability Engineering in the Defence Industry

Abstract

The work discussed in this chapter is a case study of real application of usability engineering and Agile methods in the defence industry. The area of application is the monitoring of legal compliance to import and export of technology (ITAR). Manual compliance for an organization like BAE SYSTEMS presents serious challenges and is prone to errors, which can potentially lead to serious penalties. BAE decided to automate the compliance process using intranet technology with a time scale of three months. Several factors contributed to the successful development of the system and these include detailed but flexible planning, close and intense involvement of users and stakeholders and real time iteration of prototypes. The system is currently in use and while not without limitations, is seen as successful and provides a methodological framework for future similar work.