International Summer School on Usability-Driven Software Architecture, August 22-24, 2005
Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Finland
Lecture topics
Len Bass: Usability Supporting Architectural Patterns
Iterative design is a common practice when designing user interfaces. This leads to a sequence of changes to the user interface late in the software engineering life cycle. The software engineering response to these late changes is to use the Model View Controller (MVC) architectural pattern (or other separation based pattern). This has been effective and works well except for those changes that require software modifications that cut across the elements of MVC. The late-breaking requests for changes that cut across MVC are difficult to implement in a time fashion and tend not to get made. This suggests that these types of requirements should be identified early in the life cycle. Usability Supporting Architectural Patterns (USAPs) are an attempt to identify this class of requirement and provide information that will allow the development team to do a cost/benefit analysis about their inclusion early in the life cycle. This portion of the summer school will describe USAPs and give examples of their use and validation.
About the speaker: Len Bass is a Senior Member of the Technical Staff at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and participates in the High Dependability Computing Program. He has written two award winning books in software architecture as well as several other books and numerous papers in a wide variety of areas of computer science and software engineering. He is currently working on techniques for the methodical design of software architectures and to understand how to support usability through software architecture. He has been involved in the development of numerous different production or research software systems ranging from operating systems to database management systems to automotive systems.
Jan Bosch: Usability as a Quality Factor for Software Architecture
Usability is one of the central quality attributes shaping
software architecture. The lectures first discuss the quality-driven
design and assessment of software architecture in general. The nature
of usability as a quality attribute is studied, and the
assessing of software architecture against usability requirements is
elaborated. Finally,
architectural patterns and their role in imroving architectural support
for the usability of a
software system is discussed. A number of cases to illustrate the
concepts is
discussed throughout the lectures.
About the speaker: Prof. dr. ir. Jan Bosch is a VP and
head of the
Software and Application Technologies Laboratory at Nokia Research
Center, Finland.
Earlier, he headed the software engineering research group at the
University of
Groningen, The Netherlands, where he holds a professorship in software
engineering. He received a MSc degree from the University of
Twente, The Netherlands, and a PhD degree from Lund
University, Sweden. His research activities include software
architecture design,
software product families, software variability management and
component-oriented programming. He is the author of a book "Design and
Use of Software
Architectures: Adopting and Evolving a Product Line Approach" published
by Pearson Education (Addison-Wesley & ACM Press), (co-)editor of
several books and volumes in, among others, the Springer LNCS series
and
(co-)author of a significant number of research articles. He has
organized numerous
workshops, served on many programme committees, including the ICSR'6,
CSMR'2000,
ECBS'2000, GCSE, SPLC and TOOLS conferences and is member of the
steering groups of the GCSE and WICSA conferences. He was the PC
co-chair of the
3rd IFIP (IEEE) Working Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA-3),
the
general chair for WICSA-4 and PC co-chair for the 8th International
Conference
on Software Reuse (ICSR-8).
Philippe
Palanque: Model-based Construction and Validation of
Safety-critical Interactive Systems
Modeling is one of the ways of dealing with the intrinsic complexity of
interactive systems. Modeling provides a way of describing at a higher
level of abstraction than programming languages the behavior of
interactive
systems. If the notation for building models is formally grounded, this
provides
opportunity for verifying properties over the models. Such properties
can easily be seen as necessary conditions for usable interactive
systems
(e.g. whatever state the system is in, there is at least one
interactive
object enabled on the user interface). However, iterative processes
that are
usually applied for designing interactive systems, call for ways of
refining
and modifying models in an easy and efficient way. To this end,
software
architectures are not only useful for making modifications local in the
models but
also for supporting the construction of large models by providing
structuring
frameworks. This part of the summer school presents the current state
of the art in the
field of interactive systems modelling as well as current research
trends in formal description techniques for interactive systems.
The issue of modelling interactive systems is addressed through several case studies showing:
- the impact of the interaction technique with respect to the expressive power of the notations (WIMP, direct manipulation, multimodality)
- the impact of the expressive power on validation and verification techniques
- how software architectures applied to models can support efficiently structuring and modifiability of models
The case studies will be studied using two software plate-forms developed at LIIHS
- PetShop environment for the formal description of interactive systems
- DREAM environment for supporting exploration of options and traceability of choices in the modelling phases
Fabio Paternò: Linking user tasks and user interfaces: a model-based approach
The increasing availability of many interactive devices has forced designers to strive to make applications run on a wide spectrum of platforms in order to enable users to seamlessly access information and services regardless of the device they are using. This raises the fundamental issue of how to assist software designers and developers in building such applications, with the consequent need for novel methods and tools for the development of interactive software systems able to adapt to different targets while preserving usability. Comprehensive solutions can be obtained through the use of model-based approaches, which aim to support development through the use of meaningful abstractions to avoid dealing with low-level details, and then generate the specific version adapted for each device and modality through intelligent tools. We devote particular attention to the relations among tasks and the potential interaction platforms models, to see how the change of device can affect task performance. We also discuss how to represent task models for nomadic applications and analyse their content and their combined use with informal descriptions, such as scenarios. The final part will be dedicated to run-time adaptation to different devices, paying attention to migratory interfaces, which can change device dynamically preserving continuity of task performance, explaining what they are, why they can be important for users, how it is possible to obtain them.
About the speaker Fabio Paternò is a senior researcher and the head of the laboratory on Human Interfaces in Information Systems at ISTI, Pisa (Institute of Information Science and Technologies). He developed the ConcurTaskTrees notation for specifying task models and has also designed an associated environment (CTTE) to support the development and analysis of task models specified through this notation, which has been used in various industries and universities. He was the coordinator of the MEFISTO Long Term Esprit European Project (September '97-December 2000) in which a number of methods for the design and evaluation of interactive safety-critical applications were developed and applied. He is currently involved in the European ADVISES TMR that is addressing similar topics. In these years he has also been working on methods and automatic support for usability evaluation. He is the scientific coordinator of the CAMELEON R&D IST Project, a three-year project, which aims to develop methods and tools for the design of context-dependent interactive applications. His current research interests include Migratory Interfaces , Methods and Tools for Multimodal User Interface Design and Evaluation, User Interfaces for Mobile Devices, Model-Based Design of Interactive Systems, End-User Development, Usability Evaluation of Web Sites, and Design of User Interfaces for Safety Critical Interactive Systems. He is the author of the book on Model-Based Design and Evaluation of Interactive Application<- back to main page
