A methodology for evaluating applications software is proposed, using five different categories of criteria. Three of the categories, functionality, usability, and performance, are tailored for each class of applications software. The other two categories, support and documentation, have generic criteria that can be applied to all types of application software. After a software package has been scored according to the criteria of a category, statistical analysis is used to convert the raw data to a numeric score that can be used to make between-product comparisons. The methodology has been successfully tested with UNIX-based* word processing and data base packages.
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