Software engineering activities at SEI (Software Engineering Institute)

Prototyping was shown to ease system specification and implementation, especially in the area of user interfaces. Other prototyping approaches do not allow for the evolution of the prototype into a production system or support maintenance after the system is fielded. A set of goals is presented for a modern user interface environment and Serpent, a prototype implementation that achieves these goals, is described

User Interface Management Systems: A Survey and a Proposed Design

The growth of interactive computing has resulted in increasingly more complex styles of interaction between user and computer. To facilitate the creation of highly interactive systems, the concept of the User Interface Management System (UIMS) has been developed. Following the definition of the term 'UIMS' and a consideration of the putative advantages of the UIMS approach, a number of User Interface Management Systems are examined. This examination focuses in turn on the run-time execution system, the specification notation and the design environment, with a view to establishing the features which an "ideal" UIMS should possess. On the basis of this examination, a proposal for the design of a new UIMS is presented, and progress reported towards the implementation of a prototype based on this design

A User Interface Management System Generator

Much recent research has been focused on user interfaces. A major advance in interface design is the User Interface Management System (UIMS), which mediates between the application and the user. Our research has resulted in a conceptual framework for interaction which permits the design and implementation of a UIMS generator system. This system, called Graphical User Interface Development Environment or GUIDE, allows an interface designer to specify interactively the user interface for an application. The major issues addressed by this methodology are making interfaces implementable, modifiable and flexible, allowing for user variability, making interfaces consistent and allowing for application diversity within a user community. The underlying goal of GUIDE is that interface designers should be able to specify interfaces as broadly as is possible with a manually-coded system. The specific goals of GUIDE are: The designer need not write any interface code. Action routines are provided by the designer or application implementator which implement the actions or operations of the application system. Action routines may have parameters. The designer is able to specify multiple control paths based on the state of the system and a profile of the user. Inclusion of help and prompt messages is as easy as possible. GUIDE\u27s own interface may be generated with GUIDE. GUIDE goes beyond previous efforts in UIMS design in the full parameter specification provided in the interface for application actions, in the ability to reference application global items in the interface, and in the pervasiveness of conditions throughout the system. A parser is built into GUIDE to parse conditions and provide type-checking. The GUIDE framework describes interfaces in terms of three components: what the user sees of the application world (user-defined pictures and user-defined picture classes) what the user can do (tasks and tools) what happens when the user does something (actions and decisions) These three are combined to form contexts which describe the state of the interface at any time

GUIDE: Graphical User Interfaced Development Environment

GUIDE is an interactive graphical system for designing and generating graphical user interfaces. It provides flexibility to the system designer while minimizing the amount of code which the designer must write. The GUIDE methodology includes the notions of tool, task, and context. GUIDE encourages designers to tailor their systems to individual users by inclusion of user profiles, allowing different control paths based on the user\u27s characteristics. GUIDE also provides a method for invoking application routines with parameters. Parameters may be based on user inputs and are computed at invocation time. Help messages are created along with the objects to which they refer. GUIDE handles the overhead required to display help messages

Formal functional testing of graphical user interfaces.

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