Dealing with usability in model transformation technologies

Abstract

Nowadays, the concept of Model Transformation Technology (MTT) is widely accepted in the Software Engineering community. These technologies have the capability of generating software code (solution space) from a conceptual model that specifies the system abstractly (problem space). Most MTTs disregard interaction modelling (and specifically usability modelling), even though usability is as important as functionality to produce high-quality software. The issue of ensuring usability has been researched from several perspectives. One of these perspectives is based on elaborating the information to be discussed with the user to gather usability needs and the modifications to be done in software design to support those needs. We adopt this perspective by using guidelines to capture usability requirements and architectural usability patterns. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a strategy to include existing usability features inside a complete Model Transformation Technology, from abstract modelling to code generation. In order to reach this goal, new conceptual primitives have to be defined using as a source the description of the usability features. The analyst uses these primitives to model the functionality of the usability features. Once the strategy is defined in general terms, it is applied to a specific Model Transformation Technology: the OO-Method. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.