Requirements and design of design vision, an object-oriented graphical interface to a intelligent software design assistant

Abstract

Key findings from empirical studies - early design is opportunistic, critical role of pictures in design conception; impact of various cognitive limitations - have very effectively determined requirements and design for a set of tools to support early design. Key design features of the tools include respectively: (1) The (simultaneous) display of any software modules at arbitrary levels of abstraction and from any subsystems. The unrestricted, smooth navigation between these software modules. (2) Multiple design notations - pictorial and symbolic - cross-referenced, editable, and maintained consistent across all views. Integrated views of control flow, data flow, and functional decomposition, (3) Automatic layout at arbitrary levels of nesting. Visual display of execution paths in the solution. Automatic completeness and consistency check. Automatic visual indication and listing of modules with constraint violations.