Enactment of User Interface Development Methods in Software Life Cycles

This paper presents UIDLC Manager, a software that provides user interface designers and developers with methodological guidance throughout user interface development life cycle. A methodologist firstly creates a dashboard model of the life cycle according to a corresponding meta-model in order to define a development path, decomposed into development tasks which structure the path into actions, and dependencies which serve as methodological milestones. A user interface designer or developer then enacts a previously defined development path by instantiating and interpreting a dashboard model while being provided with methodological guidance to conduct this development path. This guidance consists of steps, sub-steps, cheat sheets, and methodological actions. This approach is validated by applying it on nine classical user interface development life cycles, on two approaches for forward model-driven engineering of user interfaces based on a user interface description language, and on a linguistic approach for user interface software evolution. Author