Participative and formative evaluation as quality enhancement in the development of learning software:: the example of "cyperaceae-online"

The development of teaming software increasingly calls for an interdisciplinary cooperation of different specialists e.g. domain experts, designers, programmers and evaluating psychologists. A formative evaluation integrated into early stages of development can considerably enhance software quality. This form of evaluation requires a custom-made and participative approach. Based on a project designed to develop a botanical learning environment we present a way of transferring such a participative evaluation into practise. Evaluation process in this interdisciplinary project already began during early phases of planning and designing the learning software. Enhancement of software quality with comparatively easily applicable methods (like check lists, user-trials and pragmatically orientated experiments) will be demonstrated with examples taken from this project.