Natalia Juristo Juzgado

Including Functional Usability Features in a Model-Driven Development Method

The Software Engineering (SE) community has historically focused on working with models to represent functionality and persistence, pushing interaction modelling into the background, which has been covered by the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) community. Recently, adequately modelling interaction, and specifically usability, is being considered as a key factor for success in user acceptance, making the integration of the SE and HCI communities more necessary. If we focus on the Model-Driven Development (MDD) paradigm, we notice that there is a lack of proposals to deal with usability features from the very first steps of software development process. In general, usability features are manually implemented once the code has been generated from models. This contradicts the MDD paradigm, which claims that all the analysts’ effort must be focused on building models, and the code generation is relegated to model to code transformations. Moreover, usability features related to functionality may involve important changes in the system architecture if they are not considered from the early steps. We state that these usability features related to functionality can be represented abstractly in a conceptual model, and their implementation can be carried out automatically.

Integrated Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering Teaching Experiences

This paper presents the motivations, experiences and results of teaching integrated Software Engineering (SE) and Knowledge Engineering (KE), specifically as part of the master course organized by the Polytechnic University of Madrid (School of Computer Science). The paper outlines a possible approach to this instruction, whose aim is for software practitioners thus educated to have a flexible and moldable view of the software systems development process. This broad and malleable approach allows future practitioners to better address the increasingly more complex, divergent and innovative problems and needs raised by users. This approach is the result of a gradual and continuous process. This paper discusses the current stage of integration, giving a detailed description and justification of the scope of the integrated instruction. For the purpose of quantitatively analyzing this experience, the paper also shows the results of the evaluation conducted throughout this process at three levels (industry, students and projects).