An Evaluation Study on Dengue-Entomological Surveillance System using Alpha Acceptance Test

Abstract

Regular practice of an alpha test in system acceptance test is to involve users, who are internal to the organization, which takes place at the developers' site. The aim of an alpha test is to get early feedbacks from users and to identify bugs in order for improvements to be made. Instead of carrying out regular alpha test activities, System Usability Scale (SUS) method is used in the alpha test. The main aim of this paper is to report on how the SUS is applied as a part of an acceptance test for a newly built multi-platforms application, known as Dengue-Entomological Surveillance (DES) system. The DES system is built both as an interactive mobile application and a hybrid web application that allows its end-users; Entomology and Pest Unit (EPU) team from State Health Office of Ministry of Health of Malaysia, to collect real-time data encompassing data from ovitraps installation, automatized data analysis, as well as, entomological surveillance operations' reports concerning dengue outbreaks. Experimental design and procedures of the alpha test were carefully planned and successfully implemented. Participants' (EPU team) demographic data, execution and completion time for given tasks, and user experience on DES system comprising usability, as well as, general comments and feedbacks from users were collected and analysed. The findings of the alpha test reveal a higher percentage total of SUS score usability of the web-based application with 72.75%, as compared to 68.75% for mobile-based application.