Continuous Individual Information Technology Competency Evaluation Framework in Software Development Life Cycle

Abstract

The purpose of this research study were to (1) develop a framework for evaluating individual information technology literacy during the software development life cycle (2) to evaluate the developed framework for individual information technology literacy planning by experts and (3) to evaluate the efficiency of the developed framework for individual information technology literacy planning. Agile software development method was chosen for this work as it was a method with several sub-cycles (sprints) according to the number of modules/sub-modules in the system. With this method, developers would get to deliver and test the software module with real users more frequently. This approach would allow for evaluating users’ IT literacy during the development phase as oppose to before or after the software development. The individual IT literacy results evaluated from each sprint were used as feedback to either improve the software training material as well as curriculum or improve the software quality to better serve the current work flow. Being given an opportunity to develop an Asset Management System (AMS) for the Royal Irrigation Department (RID), we had applied our framework with a sample group of 613 people from procurement departments coming from every RID office around the country. There were a total of 16 sprints where each sprint interval was approximately 2-3 weeks. Based on the time taken to register the asset which normally takes 2-6 months without supporting software, the users took about 50-75 minutes to register the asset during the first sprint. This asset registration time continued to decrease on subsequent sprints and was 15-20 minutes by the time we reached the last sprint.