In November 2001, the Executive Board of the National Committee for Information Technology Standards (NCITS) approved the Common Industry Format (CIF) for Usability Test Reports (NCITS 354). This document standardizes the types of information captured in the software development testing process. Developed through a series of workshops sponsored by ITL, the CIF specification was created by the Industry USability Reporting (IUSR) Project involving 70 representatives from industry, government, and academia. Usability is a key factor in predicting successful deployment of software. ITL researchers created the CIF by collecting the usability testing formats used by the participating organizations, comparing the formats, and finding a set of elements that met with approval of all the members. The purpose of the CIF standard is to make it easier to incorporate usability into the procurement decision-making process for software. The CIF enables human factors engineers and usability professionals in software development companies to report the methods and results of usability tests in a standard format to customers. The NCITS press release is available at http://www.ncits.org/press/2001/CIFfasttrackpr.htm; information on the development of the CIF is available at http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/cifter/.
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