Stefan Link

A Model-Driven Development Approach Focusing Human Interaction

Human interaction like entering some data, making decisions etc. has to be dealt with as an integral part of todays business processes and the supporting IT likewise. Hence, human interaction leads to an increased complexity in software development and software systems. Current business- and model-driven development approaches provide promising means to deal with this complexity. Diverse aspects of the business process and the supporting software system are captured in models and automatically transformed to the source code of a desired platform. In the context of human interaction however, there remains a lack of precise models for specifying human interaction aspects. Thus, an extensive manual development and configuration effort is necessary leading to expensive software, badly configured interfaces and frustratedusers. In this article, we therefore demonstrate a model-driven development approach focusing on human interaction as an integral part of business processes and software systems likewise. A case study fortifies the applicability of our approach.

Modellgetriebene Entwicklung grafischer Benutzerschnittstellen (Model-Driven Development of Graphical User Interfaces)

Zusammenfassung Der Ansatz der modellgetriebenen Softwareentwicklung fokussiert Modelle als Spezifikation von Software und deren automatische Transformation bis hin zum Quellcode der gewünschten Zielplattform. Da eine durchgehende Werkzeugunterstützung unter Berücksichtigung aller Aspekte eines Softwaresystems bisher nicht möglich ist, muss der Mehrwert der modellgetriebenen Ansätze noch nachgewiesen werden. Die Durchgängigkeit ist dabei unter anderem auf Grund ungenügender oder fehlender Metamodelle zur Beschreibung einiger Aspekte eines Softwaresystems nicht gegeben. Der hier vorgestellte Ansatz greift den Aspekt der Benutzerinteraktion heraus und zeigt, wie durch die Erweiterung einer Modellierungssprache auf Metamodellebene eine werkzeugunterstützte, modellgetriebene Entwicklung plattformunabhängiger Benutzerschnittstellen ermöglicht wird. Eine Fallstudie demonstriert dabei die Machbarkeit und den Mehrwert dieses Ansatzes. Summary The approach of model-driven software development focuses on models as specification of software and on transformations of those models to finally get the source code. The advantage of the model-driven approach still has to be proven because a continuous tool-supported transformation process from model to source code with regard to all aspects of a software system is not possible yet. The lack of continuity in tool-support is among other reasons based on inappropriate or missing metamodels for describing certain aspects of a software system. The presented approach concentrates on the aspect of user interaction and demonstrates, how an extension of a modeling language allows for a tool-supported, model-driven software development of graphical user interfaces for any kind of platform. A case study demonstrates the feasibility and benefit of this approach.

Model-Driven Instrumentation of Graphical User Interfaces

In todays continuously changing markets newly developed products often do not meet the demands and expectations of customers. Research on this problem identified a large gap between developer and user expectations. Approaches to bridge this gap are to provide the developers with better information on product usage and to create a fast feedback cycle that helps tackling usage problems. Therefore, the user interface of the product, the central point of human-computer interaction, has to be instrumented to collect accurate usage data which serves as basis for further improvement steps. This paper presents a novel engineering approach that combines model-driven user interface development and flexible instrumentation with runtime monitoring. In its application, it enables observation integration into products which provides comprehensive data about usage and thus allows for fast feedback cycles and consequently increased software quality. A case-study demonstrates the applicability of this approach.