A Review of Formalisms for Describing Interactive Behaviour

A number of formal notations have been developed to assist the description or analysis of interactive systems. This paper reviews a subset of these notations from the perspective of a software engineer. It is therefore concerned with the extent to which these notations support the design and implementation of interactive systems. The notations considered on the one hand describe the capabilities and resources of users in relation to a specific system, and on the other, those aspects of an interactive system that must be analysed from a user perspective before implementation. The review concludes by surveying ongoing work that attempts to bridge the gap between the disciplinary standpoints. 1 Introduction Our aim in this paper is to take a software engineering view of some of the formalisms that are provided for understanding and representing interactive systems. Software engineering approaches are usually intended to describe internal function rather than external interface. Here we c..