Complementary Tools and Techniques for Supporting Fitness-for-Purpose of Interactive Critical Systems

Abstract

Sound design of complex, interactive, safety critical systems is very important, yet difficult. A particular challenge in the design of safety-critical systems is a typical lack of access to large numbers of testers and an inability to test early designs with traditional usability assessment tools. This inability leads to reduced information available to guide design, a phenomenon referred to as the Collingridge dilemma. Our research proposes to address parts of this problem with the development of tools and techniques for generating useful information and assessing developing designs early, to minimize the need for late change. More generally, we describe a set of three tools and techniques to support the process of ensuring fitness-for-purpose of complex interactive systems, helping designers focus on interaction across different functions of an overall system. These different tools and techniques support different parts of the overall design and evaluation process, but are focused on improving the coverage and effectiveness of evaluating interaction.

Supporting the Analysis of Safety Critical User Interfaces

“…The method adopted for the evaluation of the tools is based on a generic development process described by Billman et at [10]. They discuss two diculties: (1) when change is easy then information to guide change is scarce;…”

“…interactive input and output tasks). The editing of correspondences between the task model (see Figure 6) and the ICO model (see Figure 7) of the case study is done by a dedicated editor (this is shown in the detailed description 10 ). This editor connects interactive input tasks (from the task model) and system inputs (transitions from the system model) as well as system outputs (places from the system model) with interactive output tasks (from the task model).…”

Data-Driven Usability Test Scenario Creation

“…Task models for describing interactive systems are used during the early phases of the usercentered development cycle to gather information about user activities. Such models bring additional advantages to task analysis: they structure the gathered information about user activities and enabling the use of software tools to analyse and simulate user behaviour [4]. However, these approaches feature manual modelling of product user tasks and activities by the product developers, which is very time consuming [10,14].…”

“…This type of data can be used to create models that represent the behaviour of the product users, using data science techniques such as process mining [1]. Such models provide insights into existing user behaviour [2,16], which we can use to create usability test scenarios that accurately reflect product usage [4,6]. Additionally, the models can help identify differences in behaviour between user groups to assist test participant selection.…”

Verification of User Interface Software: The Example of Use-Related Safety Requirements and Programmable Medical Devices

“…Combining simulation with model checking, as discussed in Section III when validating the model, has also been a focus in, for example, [22]- [24]. Recent work concerned with simulations of PVS specifications has been used to support the specific modeling process described in this paper with simulation [25].…”