State of the Art in Real Projects
Friedrdrich Strauss
sd&m GmbH, Munich, Germany
strauss@sdm.de
Most specification methods concentrate on describing the functional requirements of a system. Especially object oriented notations like UML don't support an explicit specification of the user interface and its coupling to the application. We first state some requirements on (UI-)specifications for commercial projects: The user should understand the specification, the specification should contain also (non-) functional requirements on the UI, and the specification should be sufficiently detailed to design and implement the system.
We present then an example of a user interface specification representing the notations used in different projects within sd&m. The main element of these specifications is the combination of an end-user documentation of the UI with connections to the data model and the functions called by the user interface. The kind of user interface specification we use has to be refined and to be integrated with specification notations like UML. This description of how real projects collect UI-requirements and document them should help the workshop to consider the real ugly world. The proposed notation for specifications can be a basis for further discussion in the workshop.
Software design & management (sd&m) is a German company with 650 employees sd&m develops individual information systems for the back office of large companies like DaimlerChrysler, BMW, T-Mobil, NUR-Touristic, Dresdner Bank, Thyssen. The typical kind of information system we build handles customer orders with special consideration of peculiarities of the line of business and the customer organization itself. We mainly carry out projects between 5 and 50 person years.
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