Abstract User Interface Prototyping using UML Specifications

Recently, the use of scenarios for requirements acquisition has gained a lot of attention in the research community. Yet, the transition from scenarios to formal specifications, the target of the requirements engineering process, remains illdefined. Over the past decade, the rapid prototyping of user interfaces has become quite a common technique in industry; however, prototyping remains weak in linking the application domain with the user interface, and automated prototyping is mostly limited to database-oriented applications. Most importantly, the prototyping and the scenario approaches lack integration in the overall requirements engineering process. In this paper 1, we suggest a requirement engineering process that generates a user interface prototype from scenarios and yields a formal specification of the application. Scenarios are acquired in the form of collaboration diagrams as defined by the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and are enriched with user interface (UI) information. These diagrams are automatically transformed into UML Statechart specifications of the UI objects involved. From the set of obtained specifications, a UI prototype is generated that is embedded in a UI builder environment for further refinement. Based on end user feedback, the collaboration diagrams and the UI prototype may be iteratively refined, and the result of the overall process is a specification consisting of the Statechart diagrams of all the objects involved, together with the generated and refined prototype of the UI. The algorithms underlying this process have been implemented and exercised on a number of examples.