A support tool for elicitation of user interface requirements

Abstract

Requirements and user interface specifications are often elicited and specified separately, in most cases. The errors in requirements gathering and software specification phases lead to project failure and costly mistakes during software development. The lack of user involvement and the communication gap between the developers and the end-users are the major causes of poor requirements and user interface requirements elicitation. Likewise a bad user interface lessens the quality of software. The purpose of the research is to find a way to facilitate elicitation and specification of user interface requirements from users directly. This research reviewed the current works in this area and proposed an approach and applied it in a support tool (WEBSTUIRE) to help the developers and the users in user interface requirement elicitation. The WEBSTEUIR inherits many features of WEBSTORM, a web-based prototype for software specification and modeling by Sagar Talekar, and expands it to elicit user interface requirements from UML interaction diagrams. WEBSTEUIR redesigns, re-develops and improves many of WEBSTORM capabilities, and adds new capabilities to capture user interface requirements. This research describes the WEBSTEUIR approach to user interface requirements elicitation and specification with combining scenario-based approaches and prototyping approaches in a multi-user environment. The resulting SRS document which is provided by the proposed tool, has to be well understood and well presented to the developers and end-users. It also provides an easy way to extract main functionalities, features, and user interface requirements of the proposed system. The tool has been compared with several related CASE tools and has been well evaluated and accepted by a group of potential developers. The list of future work is proposed to expand functionality and capability of WEBSTEUIR.