User-Centred Requirements for Software Engineering Environments

The idea for this workshop originated when I came across and read Martin Zelkowitz's book on Requirements for Software Engineering Environments (the proceedings of a small workshop held at the University of Maryland in 1986). Although stimulated by the book I was also disappointed in that it didn't adequately address two important questions - "Whose requirements are these?" and "Will the environment which meets all these requirements be usable by software engineers?". And thus was the decision made to organise this workshop which would explicitly address these two questions. As time went by setting things up, it became clear that our workshop would happen more than five years after the Maryland workshop and thus, at the same time as addressing the two questions above, this workshop would attempt to update the Zelkowitz approach. Hence the workshop acquired two halves, one dominated by discussion of what we already know about usability problems in software engineering and the other by discussion of existing solutions (technical and otherwise) to these problems. This scheme also provided a good format for bringing together those in the HeI community concerned with the human factors of software engineering and those building tools to solve acknowledged, but rarely understood problems.

Contenu

From Individuals to Groups Through Artifacts: The Changing Semantics of Design in Software Development.- Planning and Organization in Expert Design Activities.- Views and Representations for Reverse Engineering.- Strategy Analysis: An Approach to Psychological Analysis of Artifacts.- Constraints on Design: Language, Environment and Code Representation.- Designing the Working Process - What Programmers Do Beside Programming.- Modelling Cognitive Behaviour in Specification Understanding.- Does the Notation Matter?.- The Effect of the Mental Representation of Programming Knowledge on Transfer.- Textual Tree (Prolog) Tracer: An Experimental Evaluation.- Longitudinal Studies of the Relation of Programmer Expertise and Role-expressiveness to Program Comprehension.- Search Through Multiple Representations.- User-Centered Requirements for Reverse Engineering Tools.- Why Industry Doesn't Use the Wonderful Notations We Researchers Have Given Them to Reason About Their Designs.- Viz: A Framework for Describing and Implementing Software Visualization Systems.- A Design Environment for Graphical User Interfaces.- Automated Interface Design Techniques.- Designing User Interfaces by Direct Composition: Prototyping Appearance and Behavior of User Interfaces.- Dialogue Specification as a Link Between Task Analysis and Implementation.- A Paradigm, Please - and Heavy on the Culture.- Software Producers as Software Users.- Putting the Owners of Problems in Charge with Domain-oriented Design Environments.- Is Object-oriented the Answer?.- Why Software Engineers Don't Listen to What Psychologists Don't Tell Them Anyway.- References and Indexes.- References.- Author Index.- Keyword Index.