An architecture for flexible, evolvable process-driven user-guidance environments

Complex toolsets can be difficult to use. User interfaces can help by guiding users through the alternative choices that might be possible at any given time, but this tends to lock users into the fixed interaction models dictated by the user-interface designers. Alternatively, we propose an approach where the tool utilization model is specified by a process, written in a process definition language. Our approach incorporates a user-interface specification that describes how the user-interface is to respond to, or reflect, progress through the execution of the process definition. By not tightly binding the user-guidance process, the associated userinterfaces, and the toolset, it is easy to develop alternative processes that provide widely varying levels and styles of guidance and to be responsive to evolution in the processes, user interfaces, or toolset. In this paper, we describe this approach for developing processdriven user-guidance environments, a loosely coupled architecture for...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: Timothy J. Sliski, Matthew P. Billmers, Lori A. Clarke, Leon J. Osterweil
• Keywords: Process Definition Language, Process Definition Languages, SIGSOFT 2001, Software Engineering, Specific Process Definition