UML2004a

2004

Existing software modeling tools are widely recognized to be hard to use and, hence, to adopt. We believe those usability problems are related to a legacy of formalism-centric tools that don’t promote the new challenges of modern software development. In this short paper, we briefly describe a new tool, under development, that tries to promote usability in modeling tools to support collaborative development of interactive software. It focuses on usable, real-world languages and a developer-centered design.

Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, 2015

Model-Driven Development (MDD) is an approach that considers model as first citizen elements in the context of software development. Since there are so many modeling languages, there is a need to compare them and choose the best for each concrete situation. The selection of the most appropriate modeling language may influence the output's quality, whether it is only a set of models or software. This paper introduces ARENA, a framework that allows to evaluate the quality and effectiveness of modeling languages. Then we will apply ARENA to a specific subset of User-Interface Modeling Languages (namely UMLi, UsiXML, XIS and XIS-Mobile), taking into account some of their characteristics and the influence they have when models are generated.

«UML» 2000—The Unified Modeling …, 2000

Science of Computer Programming, 2013

MDD tools are very useful to draw conceptual models and to automate code generation. Even though this would bring many benefits, wide adoption of MDD tools is not yet a reality. Various research activities are being undertaken to find why and to provide the required solutions. However, insufficient research has been done on a key factor for the acceptance of MDD tools: usability. With the help of end-users, this paper presents a framework to evaluate the usability of MDD tools. The framework will be used as a basis for a family of experiments to get clear insights into the barriers to usability that prevent MDD tools from being widely adopted in industry. To illustrate the applicability of our framework, we instantiated it for performing a usability evaluation of a tool named INTEGRANOVA. Furthermore, we compared the outcome of the study with another usability evaluation technique based on ergonomic criteria.

Journal of Membrane Science, 2011

According to the Model-Driven Development (MDD) paradigm, analysts can substantially improve the software development process concentrating their efforts on a conceptual model, which can be transformed into code by means of transformation rules applied by a model compiler. However, MDD tools are not widely used in industry. One of the reasons for this poor adoption is the lack of usability of MDD tools. This paper presents a framework to evaluate the usability of such tools. The framework will be used as a basis for a family of experiments to get clear insights into the barriers to usability that prevent MDD tools from being widely adopted in industry.

Domain-Specific Modelling Languages (DSMLs) are high-level languages specially designed to perform tasks in a particular domain. When developing DSMLs, the participation of end-users is normally limited to providing domain knowledge and testing the resulting language prototypes. Language developers, which are perhaps not domain experts, are therefore in control of the language development and evolution. This may cause misinterpretations which hamper the development process and the quality of the DSML. Thus, it would be bene�cial to promote a more active participation of end-users in the development process of DSMLs. While current DSML workbenches are mono-user and designed for technical experts, we present a process and tool support for the example-driven, collaborative construction of DSMLs in order to engage end-users in the creation of their own languages.

Journal of Visual Languages & Computing, 2012

This research enables computer literate engineers to model problems in software by minimising code they need to write. Software development is difficult for many engineers as they may have no time, experience, or access to software development tools necessary to model their problems. Using a combination of modelling via use of formulae (equations) and visualisation of the way these formulae interact, it is possible to construct modelling software without requiring code. This technique of user-driven modelling/programming (UDM/P) could be applied to any problem that requires linked equations to be represented and tracked, and results from these calculated. End-user programming could be tackled by many researchers cooperating to create specific solutions to different kinds of end-user programming problems. A stepped ontology based translation process assists with progress towards a generic solution, this is first applied to engineering modelling.

Computer-Aided Design of User Interfaces VI, 2009

Model-based Software Development is carried out as a well definied process. Depending on the applied approach, different phases can be distinguished, e.g. requirements specification, design, prototyping, implementation and usability evaluation. During this iterative process manyfold artifacts are developed and modified, including e.g. models, source code and usability evaluation data. CASE tools support the development stages well, but lack a seamless integration of usability evaluation methods. We aim at bridging the gap between development and usability, through enabling the cooperative use of artifacts with the particular tools. Hence usability experts save time to prepare an evaluation and results are easier to incorporate back into the development process. We show exemplary our work on enhancing the Eclipse framework to support usability evaluation for task model based software development.

The development of interactive media and software systems for practice includes different disciplines like requirements management, usability engineering, and software engineering. Analyzing, documenting and formalizing functional and ergonomic requirements so that they can be used for the design and implementation of interactive software systems, is a complex task for the domain experts, requirements analysts, and usability engineers. A critical aspect is the transformation of the requirements in the direction of software development: How can the risk of misinterpreting requirements and of delivering wrong software components be minimized? One positive factor could be the usage of model-driven or model-based techniques that contributes to lowering the risk of semantic gaps or misinterpretations. Model-based user interface design (MBUID) focus' on interactive systems: Precise and concise requirements can be transformed automatically and the generated code is ready to use or can be modified by software or usability engineers. Usability aspects are part of the models so that ergonomic requirements can be considered easily in an early project stage. This paper contributes to the discussion about the practical application of MBUID.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011