Generating contextual help for user interfaces from software requirements

Abstract

Software requirements are an essential stepping stone for engineering any software system that meets the needs of its stakeholders. User interface (UI) contextual help provides end users with much-needed support for understanding how to use a software system. This article presents an approach for generating contextual help from software requirements, while maintaining the ability to provide human input on the generated help. Domain classes, use cases, and UI flow models embody information that is valuable for help generation and are thereby used by the proposed approach. Templates are also used to define how requirements are associated with their contextual help counterpart elements. The generated help is represented using an existing contextual help definition language called CHAINXML. The latter was extended to support templates and alternatives in order to make the help generation process more seamless and to reduce the repetition in the generated help. The usefulness (usability and utility) of the generated help was evaluated by conducting a study with end users. The results showed that the participants found the help to be highly useful and most of them chose to use this help when given the opportunity to do so in a real-life case.