Ensuring the Consistency Between User Requirements and GUI Prototypes: A Behavior-Based Automated Approach

Thiago Rocha Silva,Marco Winckler,Hallvard Trætteberg

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-29381-9_39

Thiago Rocha Silva, Marco Winckler + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29381-9_39

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Abstract

In a user-centered design process, graphical user interface (GUI) prototypes may be seen as an important early artifact to design and validate user requirements before making strong commitments with a full-fledged version of the user interface. Ensuring the consistency of GUI prototypes with other representations of the user requirements is then a critical aspect of the design process. This paper presents an approach which extends Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) by employing an ontology in order to provide automated assessment for GUI prototypes as design artifacts. The approach has been evaluated by exploiting user requirements described by a group of experts in the flight tickets e-commerce domain. Such requirements gave rise to a set of User Stories that have been used to automatically check the consistency of Balsamiq prototypes which were reengineered from an existing web system for booking business trips. The results have shown our approach was able to identify different types of inconsistencies in the set of analyzed artifacts, allowing to build an effective correspondence between user requirements and their representation in GUI prototypes.

Highlights

In iterative processes, the design of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) can evolve all along the software development process as a result of requirements evolution and change, or the need of understanding and validating a given interpretation of requirements [1]
Motivated by such a gap, this paper presents an approach based on Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and User Stories to support the specification and the automated assessment of user requirements on low-fidelity web GUI prototypes designed along the development cycle of interactive systems
Our method proposes to engineer GUIs by guiding the development team to avoid design solutions that conflict with the user requirements

Summary

Introduction

The design of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) can evolve all along the software development process as a result of requirements evolution and change, or the need of understanding and validating a given interpretation of requirements [1]. While the beginning of the project usually requires a low-level of formality with GUI prototypes being hand-sketched to explore design solutions and clarify user requirements, the development phase requires more refined versions frequently describing presentation and dialog aspects of interaction. Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) [2] has stood out in the software engineering community as an effective approach to provide automated acceptance testing by specifying natural language user requirements and their tests in a single textual artifact. BDD benefits from a requirements specification based on User Stories [3] which are understandable for both technical and non-technical stakeholders. Despite its benefits providing automated testing of user requirements, BDD and other testing approaches focus essentially on assessing interactive artifacts that are produced late in the design process, such as full-fledged versions of user interfaces. As far as early artifacts such as rough GUI prototypes are a concern, current approaches offer no support for automated assessment

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