AJMU: An aspect-oriented framework for evaluating the usability of WIMP applications

Abstract

Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) is recognized as one of the main techniques for separation of concerns. AOP has been used for automatic evaluation of the usability of WIMP applications, with the aim of monitoring events and GUI components and recording data in logs. A weakness of AOP approaches is low semantic value and a low level of abstraction of the results. One possible solution to overcome these limitations is to use an AO framework for assessing the usability of user tasks. However, little research has been devoted the development of AO frameworks from scratch. Although different design and programming patterns are available, insufficient experience has been reported regarding their application in the development of frameworks. This paper presents AJMU, an AO framework for the automatic evaluation of the usability of user tasks in desktop applications. AJMU was developed from scratch, using AO patterns. This paper also reports on experiments involving AJMU's instantiation with real applications.