Wisdom - A UML Based Architecture for Interactive Systems

2002

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.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2000

The UML suggests the employment of use cases for capturing the requirements and for specifying the interaction between the users and the system being modeled. Use cases are easily understood by users since they are essentially textual descriptions, but lack the precision and the conciseness accomplished by the other diagrammatic tools of UML. Besides, there is no systematic method that helps the designer to obtain such UML diagrams from a set of use cases. In this paper we present a diagrammatic tool to represent the users/system interaction called User Interaction Diagram (UID). UIDs have proven to be a valuable tool to gather requirements since they describe the exchange of information between the system and the user in a high level of abstraction, without considering specific user interface aspects and design details as in other UML diagrams. We show how UIDs can be incorporated into the requirements and analysis workflows of the Unified Process for software development.

«UML» 2000—The Unified Modeling …, 2000

Software design is a process of transformation from problem domain to implementation domain based on two crucial models: conceptual and system models. User-Centred Design (UCD) differs from traditional software design in the perspective providing to conceptual modelling. It concentrates on knowledge about the context of use rather than the accidental features of problem domain. UCD is also concerned with the integration of that knowledge into the system model by means of contextualization that allows combining the descriptions of usage with the functional specifications during the process in order to accomplish a valid design solution. In this paper, we present the ADOI (Another Dimension of Information) approach that aims at providing support for contextual development. Due to its declarative specifications ADOI allows explicit conceptualization of usage, as well as of contextual linkage required for the transformation. A conceptualization-driven architecture is in ADOI open with respect to different perspectives for the user interface and the system. As a result, ADOI realizes the role of a complement of existing methods by providing a development support that can be integrated into different design models.

ICSE Workshop on SE-HCI, 2003

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011

Automated Software Engineering, 2006

User interface (UI) prototyping and scenario engineering have become popular techniques. Yet, the transition from scenario to formal specifications and the generation of UI code is still ill-defined and essentially a manual task, and the two techniques lack integration in the overall requirements engineering process. In this paper, we suggest an approach for requirements engineering that generates a user interface prototype from scenarios and yields a formal specification of the application. Scenarios are acquired in the form of collaboration diagrams as defined by the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and are enriched with user interface (UI) information. These diagrams are automatically transformed into UML Statechart specifications of the UI objects involved. From the set of obtained specifications, a UI prototype is generated that is embedded in a UI builder environment for further refinement. Based on end user feedback, the collaboration diagrams and the UI prototype may be iteratively refined, and the result of the overall process is a specification consisting of the Statechart diagrams of all the objects involved, together with the generated and refined prototype of the UI. The algorithms underlying this process have been implemented and exercised on a number of examples.

This paper discusses different UIs design approaches. We describe how to design user interfaces, based on a MDD approach, by applying the XIS language. XIS is a coherent UML profile focused on model interactive systems. XIS integrates best practices and principles of the MDA/MDD paradigm to improve the UI design, such as separation of concerns, model-to-model and model-to-code transformations. In that way, we discuss some issues regarding the transformation processes, from XIS-based models into software systems artifacts.

2003

The UML suite of modeling languages fails to properly model the human-computer interaction. On the other hand, newly conceived HCI modeling languages need to foresee their role as members of the family of languages that constitute the UML representations for software design, due to their wide acceptance by both researchers and practitioners. MoLIC, our proposed HCI modeling language, seems to be a natural family member since many consistency checks seem to be possible between MoLIC and other software design notations used in UML. MoLIC is based on Semiotic Engineering and represents interaction as threads of conversation users may have with the system.