Conciliating User Interface and Business Domain Analysis and Design

Abstract

User Interfaces (UI) are an essential part of most softwares, especially data intensive ones as database or Web based applications.

Most of the approaches dealing with UI focus on design and implementation aspects and are driven by a specific technology. We believe UI specification has already to be taken into account through the analysis phase, because it is closely related to the application Business Domain (BD), which is apprehended in the earliest steps of the Analysis and Design Process (A&D-Pr). Moreover, during the analysis phase, the UI is described in a more abstract way and a larger variety of UI can be taken into consideration.

The UI and the BD aspects of the application have to be studied in a closely-related way. But most of the existing approaches propose a specific notation for the UI, different from the one used to define the BD. And when guidelines are associated with the notation, they focus on the UI and are poorly related to the BD. We propose an integrated approach (i) using a single notation in order to facilitate and support the integration of BD and UI aspects modeling and (ii) proposing an application model distinguishing the UI and BD aspects via separate views and clearly setting relationships between them. We choose the UML notation to illustrate our work in order to facilitate its use in any standard A&D-Pr. Our approach also includes a methodology to explain how to create the application model. Its aim is not only to model the UI from a pure technical point of view, but from a business one, providing guidelines for error management, or business rules support for instance.

In this paper, we present our UML profile for UI and show how we could take advantage of it through the different phases of the A&D-Pr.