Automatic Generation of User Interface Models and Prototypes from Domain and Use Case Models

Abstract

The development of interactive systems typically involves the separate design and development of disparate system components by different software developers. The user interface (UI) is the part of an interactive system through which a user can access the system functionality. User interface development is a complex task that typically involves the construction of prototypes and/or models. A prototype facilitates the communication with the stakeholders, especially with the end users, and allows for the validation of elicited requirements. Modelling is a well established way people take for dealing with complexity. A model allows one to focus on important properties of the system being modelled and abstract away from unimportant issues. Software models may capture relevant parts of the problem and solution domains and are typically used as a means for reasoning about the system properties and for communicating with the stakeholders. The user interface tends to be viewed differently, depending on what community the UI designer belongs to. UI designers that are more identified with the Software Engineering (SE) community tend to highlight the system functionality issues, and how it encapsulates system behaviour to provide to the user. UI designers that are more identified with the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community tend to focus on user task analysis and the way the user shall work on the UI. According to the HCI perspective, one of the concerns that shall be modelled is the user intended tasks on the interactive system, and this is made through the development of user task analysis. Typically, task analysis and modelling involve the development of goal and task hierarchies and the identification of objects and actions involved in each task (Dix et al., 1998). Besides this task model, a view of the UI relevant aspects of the system core structure and functionality may also be modelled, along with a UI presentation model, in order to complete the whole interactive system model. In the SE community, a common practice is to build a Unified Modelling Language (UML) system model, comprising a domain model and a use case model, supplemented by a non-functional UI prototype, in the early stages of the software development process (Jacobson et al., 1999; Pressman, 2005). The domain model captures the main system’s domain classes, its attributes, relations and, in some cases, its operations, through UML class diagrams. The use case model captures the main system functionalities from the user’s point of view