Usability is a key discipline related to the development of modern software systems. Its goal is to assess the userfriendliness and effectiveness of a software product from the user point of view. Therefore, proper methodologies and techniques to perform this assessment are definitely relevant. Heuristic evaluation is probably the most commonly used method for usability assessment. Initially developed by Nielsen and Molich in the '90s, traditional heuristic evaluations rely on Nielsen's wellknown 10 usability heuristics. However, recent evidence suggests that such heuristics are not sufficiently complete for dealing with new domains such as interactive television, virtual worlds, and many others. In addition to the lack of suitability of traditional heuristics, in the past years the lack of a robust methodology or process to effectively develop and validate these new domainspecific heuristics has been documented. In this paper we summarize current evidence regarding the lack of suitability of traditional heuristics, as well as the need to develop new domain-specific heuristics. After identifying and acknowledging existing gaps in heuristics for state-of-the-art technology, as documented by other researchers, we present PROMETHEUS, a PROcedural METhodology for developing HEuristics of USability. PROMETHEUS refines the methodology of , and is composed of 8 stages. PROMETHEUS clearly defines the artifacts that are required and produced by each stage, and also presents a set of quality indicators in order to assess the need for further refinement in the development of new heuristics. As an initial validation of PROMETHEUS, we apply a questionnaire to several researchers that have used the methodology of Rusu et al. , and we have also performed a small retrospective study, computing the quality indicators of several previous studies. Our results suggest that PROMETHEUS is a very promising methodology, and that the metrics and indicators are indeed pertinent with respect to the conclusions of previous studies.
Aspect-oriented languages are usually formulated as an extension to existing languages, without paying any special attention to the underlying exception handling mechanisms. Consequently, aspect exceptions and handlers are no different than base exceptions and handlers. Conflation between aspect and base exceptions and handlers may inadvertently trigger execution of unintended handlers, changing the expected program behavior: aspect exceptions are accidentally caught by base handlers or vice-versa. Programmers cannot state the desired interaction between aspect and base exceptions and handlers. Specific instances of this issue have been identified by others researchers. We distill the essence of the problem and designate it as the exception conflation problem. Consequently, we propose a semantics for an aspect-oriented language with execution levels and an exception handling mechanism that solves the exception conflation problem. By default, the language ensures there is no interaction between base and aspect exceptions and handlers, and provides level-shifting operators to flexibly specify interaction between them when required. We illustrate the benefits of our proposal with a representative set of examples.
We present Monascheme, an extensible aspect-oriented programming language based on monadic aspect weaving. Extensions to the aspect language are defined as monads, enabling easy, simple and modular prototyping. The language is implemented as an embedded language in Racket. We illustrate the approach with an execution level monad and a level-aware exception transformer. Semantic variations can be obtained through monad combinations. This work is also a first step towards a framework for controlling aspects with monads in the pointcut and advice model of AOP.
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