Formal Interactive Systems Analysis and Usability Inspection Methods: Two Incompatible Worlds?

An integrated framework for the analysis of dependable interactive systems (IFADIS): Its tool support and evaluation

“…This similarity is discussed in more detail in Loer and Harrison (2001). Both analysis techniques focus on the systematic application of properties or heuristics to explore unforeseen consequences of the design.…”

“…A number of approaches including (Abowd et al, 1995;d'Ausbourg, 1998;Campos and Harrison, 2001;Paternò, 1996;Loer, 2003), have developed usability requirements formally. Furthermore, (Loer and Harrison, 2001) describes how usability heuristics may be be translated into formal property specifications. While these activities illustrate technical feasibility they do not demonstrate that the techniques used are acceptable for use by the target audience of usability and system engineers.…”

State of the Art on Formal Methods for Interactive Systems

“…Following this view of user interface structure, the authors develop a formal specification of a research reactor used in the University of Virginia Reactor (UVAR) for training nuclear engineering students, radiation damage studies, and other studies (Loer and Harrison 2000). In order to illustrate the specification layers, the authors focus on the safety control rod system, one of the reactor subsystems.…”

Interaction Walkthrough: Evaluation of Safety Critical Interactive Systems

“…A third reason for the effectiveness of IW is that the assessor can choose any programming language or approach to construct the simulation -thus allowing them to work in a much more suitable programming environment than perhaps the implementors of the actual target system were able to. For example, the implementors of the target system may have had to use assembler or PIC code, whereas the IW assessor can use Java, SMV [9,10], or Promela -or any special purpuse GUI languages, such as VEG [1] -as they wish. Using a 'nice' language with powerful abstraction features, particularly one with model checking, appropriate for the interactive simulation will highlight inconsistencies in the target design in a way that cannot be done on the target system.…”

“…Fifth, the assessor can use a full range of modern model checking and theorem proving techniques to check the interface against desirable interaction properties. Loer and Harrison give persuasive examples [9,10] of the effectiveness of this approach -indeed, their work is essentially IW, as they had to reverse engineer systems (though their approach is suited to early use in software production, on the assumption that formal specifications are available), and their systems do not have the performance to be production systems.…”