Software Architecture Modeling for User Interfaces

Abstract

AbstractThe design of software architecture has become an active area of research. Although the ad‐hoc development of software is acceptable for throwaway prototypes, it is now widely recognized that architectural design of complex systems can no longer simply emerge from craft skills. This shared scientific wisdom calls for increased attention in the practice of user interface development.Current practice in prototyping is not the only motivation for paying attention to architectural design. Emerging interaction techniques are more and more complex.Software architecture modeling serves two distinct but complementary purposes: the forward design and the reverse design of software structures. On one hand, software architecture modeling guides the development of a future system; on the other hand, it helps to understand the organization of existing code. In both cases, the problem is how to capture architectural knowledge and convey this knowledge to software designers and maintainers in a useful way.This article reports a state of the art on software architecture modeling for interactive systems. It is structured in the following first, the key concepts from software architecture research and make explicit the design steps that most software designers in HCI tend to blend in a fuzzy way are introduced. Building on general concepts and practice from mainstream software engineering, we then present a comparative analysis of the most significant architecture models developed in HCS is then presented.The article primarily concentrate on the conceptual aspects of architectural design. The reification of conceptual architectures into implementation architectures which rely on the underlying platform and programming tools, is not addressed.