How software is reviewed.

Whenever I write reviews here, my goal is to produce something that is helpful, informative and worth your time. I tried to establish a criteria that would be able to grade software but I found that this would not work because:

1. There is a huge diversity in software.
2. Even in software that is comparable it is not fair to judge them based on the same criteria because they might have different goals.

For example, the desktop environments KDE and Xfce cannot be compared in this way because they have different goals. While Xfce describes itself as a lightweight desktop environment designed for productivity and speed, KDE describes itself as a modern desktop that provides a full suite of user applications.

Figure: The KDE desktop and the Xfce desktop environments

It would not be fair to give KDE less points because it is not as quick or to give Xfce less points because it does not have as many features. Keeping this in mind, I have created some guiding questions that I will be using to review these applications:

Question 1: Is the interface usable?
Usability of the interface need not be related to ease of use. It is related to the efficiency of the interface. It is possible for a command line program like Gnuplot to do well in this area because of the efficiency of the interface. In a few quick commands, a graph can be generated.

Question 2: Does the software fulfill the goals of its project?

It is important for a software to fulfill the goals that are set for it. This is a good way of evaluating the success of the project.

Question 3: Is the software readily available and accessible?

Does one require to jump through many hoops to get software? A lot of us intend to spend time using the software and not downloading different components or installing it.

Question 4: Is there sufficient documentation and/or support?

A program should have sufficient documentation so that it is possible to others to learn how to use the program. Support in the form of forums and mailing lists are also useful. 

Question 5: Is the software stable and dependable?

It should be possible to use software without having to worry about saving changes every 2 minutes lest a crash takes place. 

Question 6: Does the software contain a good range of features appropriate to its goal?

If software describes itself as being full featured, it should have a good range of useful features. 

Question 7: Is the software responsive?

To a certain degree, all software should be responsive enough to ensure smooth workflow and the absence of frustration. Software that is slow enough to test your patience should suffer a penalty.

Bonus marks may be awarded for the following aspects, though it is perfectly possible tor an application to attain full points without these aspects.


Question 1: Is the software multi-platform?
Multi platform software showcases the care of the developers in making software available for a wider audience. I believe that extra effort like this should be awarded extra marks.


Question 2: Is the software free and/or open source?
The selflessness of developers has to be admired.

Software will be graded in a 1-10 scale using the above guiding questions and displayed in the review meter where the grades awarded to every program that has been reviewed in this site should be available for display.

Tux Crazy by Ankur Srivastava is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.