Michaela Bačíková

Defining Domain Language of Graphical User Interfaces

Domain-specific languages are computer (programming, modeling, specification) languages devoted to solving problems in a specific domain. The least examined DSL development phases are analysis and design. Various formal methodologies exist, however domain analysis is still done informally most of the time. There are also methodologies of deriving DSLs from existing ontologies but the presumption is to have an ontology for the specific domain. We propose a solution of a user interface driven domain analysis and we focus on how it can be incorporated into the DSL design phase. We will present the preliminary results of the DEAL prototype, which can be used to transform GUIs to DSL grammars incorporating concepts from a domain and thus to help in the preliminary phases of the DSL design.

Pragmatic model-driven software development from the viewpoint of a programmer: Teaching experience

Model-driven software development is surrounded by numerous myths and misunderstandings that hamper its adoption. We have designed our course of model-driven development approach with the goal to introduce it from the viewpoint of a programmer as a pragmatic tool for solving concrete problems in development process. The course covers several techniques and principles of model-driven development instead of concentrating on a single tool. To explain these techniques we use a case-study that is iteratively developed by the students during the course. In the paper we explain the structure of our case study, contents of individual iterations, and our overall experience with this approach.

Ergonomic vs. domain usability of user interfaces

In this paper we introduce new definitions of understandability and domain usability and provide feasibility analysis of domain usability. The goal of this paper is to draw attention to domain usability, to stimulate further research in this area and motivate creation of new testing methods for evaluating domain usability.

Domain Usability, User’s Perception

The term ’usability’ is generally used today to identify the degree of a user interface, application or a device to which it satisfies the user during usage. It is often referred to as “user friendliness” or “software ergonomics”. In this paper we argue that usability is formed by two inseparable parts. The first is the ergonomic usability, the second aspect we call domain usability. During our research we found out, that domain usability is equally important as ergonomic usability, however, it is often neglected by software designers. In this paper we introduce new definitions of understandability and domain usability. Finally the total usability is formed by two aspects - domain and ergonomic. We hope this paper to be a guide or a rule for creating applications that are as close as possible to a domain user. The goal of this paper is to draw attention to domain usability and to stimulate further research in this area.

Analyzing stereotypes of creating graphical user interfaces

A graphical user interface (GUI, UI) is an important part of an application, with which users interact directly. It should be implemented in the best way with respect to understandability. If a user does not understand the terms in the UI, he or she cannot work with it; then the whole system is worthless. In order to serve well the UI should contain domain-specific terms and describe domain-specific processes. It is the primary source for domain analysis right after domain users and experts. Our general goal is to propose a method for an automatic domain analysis of user interfaces. First, however, the basic principles and stereotypes must be defined that are used when creating user interfaces and rules must be derived for creating an information extracting algorithm. In this paper these stereotypes are listed and analyzed and a set of rules for extracting domain information is created. A taxonomy of UIs and a taxonomy of components based on their domain-specific information is also proposed. Our DEAL method for extracting this information is outlined and a prototype of DEAL is presented. Also our goals for the future are listed: expanding the prototype for different components and different types of UIs.

Usability of a domain-specific language for a gesture-driven IDE

User interfaces (UIs) are advancing in every direction. The usage of touch screen devices and adaptation their UIs lives its boom. However integrated development environments (IDEs) that are used to develop the same UIs are oversleeping the time. They are directed to developing usable software, but forgot to be usable by themselves. Our goal is to design a new way of user interaction for common IDEs with the help of touch. The target group are hybrid devices formed by a physical keyboard and either an integrated, or separate, touch screen display. In this paper we describe a set of general purpose and domain-specific gestures which represents a language for working with a touch-driven IDE and provide a method their design. We performed two studies with developers from industry and university and developed a prototype of a gesture-driven IDE to evaluate the usability of the presented approach.

Bootstrapping DSLs from user interfaces

Implementation of domain-specific languages (DSLs) is supported by powerful tools that can automatically generate various artifacts from the language specification. Domain analysis and design of a language, however, are usually done manually. Automatic extraction of domain information can be used to generate preliminary version of the language specification and therefore bootstrap the development process. One of the most suitable sources of domain information are graphical user interfaces (GUIs). In this paper we present the experiment validating this approach. Several existing applications were automatically analyzed to extract their domain models and generate a DSL processor based on them.

Using social networks for supervising and mentoring

In this paper we describe the experience of the high school and university teachers with using social networks for supervising. We aimed at mentoring of small groups such as student theses and group projects. To support our claims, we performed a qualitative and quantitative study along with an experiment of using social networks in supervising. The studies were answered by multiple high school and university students and teachers. The results of the studies and the experiment are described in this paper. Although social networks have the potential to be used in supervising, they also have a lot of disadvantages making their adoption harder. Existing solutions such as Ning resolved some of these issues, but they are not tailored for supervising. To answer to the results, we describe an outline of the future prototype as a possible solution. We believe that integration of existing solutions is the key to achieve successful results. In our future research, we will leverage not only from the knowledge of the target group of university and high school teachers, but we will also apply experience from practice by cooperating with the Fpt Slovakia, s.r.o. company with the aim of directly preparing students for practice. This paper emerged from the cooperation of the Technical university of Košice, Ostrovského high school and the software company Fpt Slovakia, s.r.o.

DSL-driven generation of Graphical User Interfaces

Domain-specific languages (DSLs) are becoming more and more popular. However, the number of DSLs is still small when comparing to the number of existing applications. The results of our previous research showed that it is possible to speed up the DSL development process by aiding the first development phases (design and implementation). More specifically it is possible to generate DSLs from existing GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces) of component-based applications. Now we want to use the generated DSLs and their models to generate new user interfaces or even whole new applications. To verify this claim, in this paper we use existing technologies which simplify the creation of web applications: iTasks. We also describe stereotypes of creating GUIs which we used to extract data from existing applications and to generate new applications. In the last part of this paper we limit the types of applications, which can be used for extraction based on our experiments with the prototype.

The design of manual domain usability evaluation techniques

Abstract In this paper we design novel techniques for manual domain usability evaluation. Domain usability is the aspect of a particular user interface that relates to its terminology, hierarchy of terms, feature descriptions and icons, used language and consistency. However, domain usability is often neglected not only by software developers, but also by many researchers. The design of formal means to evaluate existing user interfaces would aid the development of better, domain-usable user interfaces. We designed six qualitative evaluation techniques and one formal evaluation technique based on System Usability Scale (SUS). To show the viability of the designed techniques, we demonstrate each of them in the domain of gospel music. Two of the techniques were used to experimentally verify the impact of specific domain usability aspects on usability and user experience. In this paper we also focus on the equality of the domain usability aspects with the goal of designing domain usability metrics. The preliminary design of the metrics is also presented in this paper and areas of future research are suggested.