What Drives Software Development: Bridging the Gap Between Software and Usability Engineering

Abstract

This chapter presents two important issues integrating software and usability engineering. The first issue is use case driven development, we discuss the importance of describing use cases through technology-free and implementation independent descriptions of user intentions and system responsibilities. We provide examples that demonstrate innovative tools support for multiple representations of essential use cases. The second issue is the architecture-centric nature of modern software development. Here we discuss the importance of identifying usability aspects at the architectural level and describe an extension of the boundary-control-entity UML-based pattern that supports dialogue and presentation elements at the conceptual architectural level. In this chapter we present and contrast several examples that describe how our approach can be used to bridge software and usability engineering and also supported by innovative developer-centric tools.