Integrating usage monitoring for continuous evaluation and testing in the UI of an industry application

Developing interactive systems and testing with realistic scenarios requires a detailed understanding of how these systems are used in their real environment. In this paper, we report on our experience from implementing a usage monitoring approach for the touch-enabled human machine interface of an industrial machine. The approach supports automated recording of user interface events as basis for analyzing interactions of users with the system. It collects information about navigation paths to different screens, activities on these screens, and the usage of functionality provided by the application. We evaluated three different approaches to integrate the required usage monitoring into the UI, considering aspects such as necessary changes to the existing code base, dependencies to third-party libraries, and the entailed performance overhead. The paper provides a detailed description of the implementation of the selected approach and a discussion of the lessons we learned from integrating the monitoring in an existing application.