Model-Driven Prototyping for Corporate Software Specification

Abstract

Abstract. Corporate software development faces very demanding challenges, especially concerning the design of user interfaces. Collaborative design with stakeholders demands modeling methods that everybody can understand and apply. But when using traditional, paper-based methods to gather and document requirements, an IT organization often experiences frustrating communication issues between the business and development teams. We present ways of implementing model-driven prototyping for corporate software development. Without harming agile principles and practice, detailed prototypes can be employed for collaborative design. Model-driven prototyping beats a new path towards visual specifications and the substitution of paper-based artifacts.

Inspector: Interactive UI Specification Tool

“…As a consequence of the lack of appropriate tools, many actors tend to use tools they are familiar with and which can be categorized as being low threshold -low ceiling -narrow walls IDEs, which has been well observed by [8]. We distinguish between two different populations of tool-users, which can be assigned to two different areas of corporate UI development projects: (1) Client: Business personnel, marketers, domain experts, or HCI experts use Office-like applications such as Word or Power Point [14] to document user needs and context of use in order to define the problem-space. They will translate the needs as analyzed, and their contextual conditions, into general usage requirements and evaluate their work at several quality gates.…”

“…Over the last 3 years, we observed UI development practice in the German automotive industry [14,16]. As a consequence of the lack of appropriate tools, many actors tend to use tools they are familiar with and which can be categorized as being low threshold -low ceiling -narrow walls IDEs, which has been well observed by [8].…”

Multi-fidelity User Interface Specifications

“…This makes it difficult to promote concepts and creative thinking down the supply chain without media disruptions and loss of precision [16]. The following negative factors therefore contribute to UI development failure: 1.…”

“…2. Whereas conceptual modeling, prototyping or evaluation have always been undertaken by suppliers, the client himself now wants to work in the solution space and therefore needs to develop the UI specification in-house [16]. 3.…”

“…An early version of a model-driven UI specification method has been already presented [16]. With a separation of development concerns, different levels of abstraction and a simulation framework, we were able to establish an advanced UI modeling method.…”