Evaluating the Usefulness and Ease of Use of a Groupware Tool for the Software Architecture Evaluation Process

We have developed a framework for groupware tool support for the software architecture evaluation process in the context of global software development. We have empirically assessed the effectiveness of the groupware-supported software architecture evaluation process in a set of controlled experiments. While we found that groupware-supported distributed meetings can be very effective, we saw the need to investigate users' acceptance of the tool used in these empirical studies. In this paper we report on the "perceived usefulness" and "ease of use" of the groupware tool based on the adapted Davis' technology acceptance model (TAM), a widely used general-purpose instrument for measuring users' attitude towards a particular technology. Main results from analyzing the TAM data are: a majority of the participants found the tool quite useful and easy to use for supporting collaborative tasks like architecture evaluation; a majority of the respondents was also very positive about the regular use of the tool for collaborative tasks in the future. However, there was considerably less support for preferring a distributed tool-based meeting to a face-to-face meeting.