The objective was to carry out the testing of the Assessment Design tools in order to verify that it meets all the previously defined requirements. This report documents the outcome of the verification of the Assessment Design tools.
The goal of the verification task was to ensure that the tools:
- respond correctly to a varied set of inputs,
- perform their functions in an acceptable time and reasonable use of computational resource,
- are adequate in terms of usability, and,
- are verified against control data.
The following actions were completed for all tools as part of the verification and are described in detail in this report:
- Definition of the Verification Cases and evaluation criteria.
- Organisation of training sessions (for technical and industrial partners).
- Collection of data for each Verification Case.
- Running the Verification Cases (by technical and industrial partners).
- Analysis of the results based on quantitative and qualitative assessments.
- Creation of a task list of changes that could improve the tool to improve performance.
A stable beta version of the tools in now available that is fully documented with a technical manual and a user manual. The tools will be further validated and demonstrated using real data from the first pilot experiences.
According to the quantitative results the end-users involved in evaluating the Assessment Design tools are very satisfied with the usability and performance of all modules described in this report. The categories user-friendliness and value obtained a slightly less positive feedback (though not for all modules) but in general they satisfied the end-users’ requirements. The qualitative assessment feedback gathered some improvements that were compiled and categorised. As a result of this, a certain number of high-priority improvements (15 for System Performance and Energy Yield (SPEY), 25 for System Lifetime Costs (SLC), 9 for Reliability, Availability, Maintainability, and Survivability (RAMS), and 26 for Environmental and Social Acceptance (ESA) were selected to be implemented in the final release of the DTOceanPlus suite of design tools.