Mary Theofanos and Brian Stanton, of the Information Access Division, led an ISO Joint Working Group (JWG) meeting of experts from the software engineering usability community and the human factors and ergonomics community focused on defining the family of Common Industry Formats (CIF) for Usability. This 2nd JWG meeting of ISO JTC1/SC7 and TC159/SC4 was held in Paris, France at AFNOR -- The French National Standards Organization -- January 22-23, 2007. Participation included technical experts from academia, industry and government representing seven countries including (United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Australia). This JWG focuses solely on the CIF family of documents. The CIF framework contains 10 proposed documents including: A Context of Use Specification, User and Organizational Requirements Specification, User Interface Requirements Specification and a Formative Test Report Specification. All components of the framework were identified and their respective contents enumerated. In addition, all user groups and existing related standards were identified. A list of terms that require clear definitions was also compiled. A plan was developed to further refine the contents of each document and complete the Technical Report. A follow-up meeting will be held at NIST in Gaithersburg, April 19-20, 2007. Mary Theofanos is a Joint Convener and Brian Stanton is the secretary of the JWG.

This new CIF framework supplements ISO Standard 25062 “Software Engineering- Software Quality and Requirements Evaluation - Common Industry Format for Usability Test Reports”, approved in June 2005. The CIF represents a new, pioneering approach to insuring software quality: an approach based on user-centered testing of software. The base document for this standard was developed jointly by technical staff in IAD and industry.

Contact: Mary Theofanos, ext. 5889