The Role of HCI in CASE Tools Supporting Formal Methods

Abstract

From 1988 through 1992, I led two research groups: the advanced interfaces section of NRL's Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) laboratory, which is developing advanced user interface techniques, and a software engineering group, which is designing formal methods for real-time systems. In 1989, a multidisciplinary team of HCI experts and software engineers, drawn from the two groups, began a new research task whose purpose was two-fold: to evaluate existing formal methods for representing and reasoning about a system's timing behavior and to build a prototype CASE toolset supporting the most promising methods. From the beginning, we recognized that the success of the CASE tools depended not only on powerful analysis methods but also on the quality of the toolset's user interface and its software design [4]. A high-quality user interface would allow developers to create, edit, and analyze specifications easily and effectively. A high-quality software design would enforce a clean separation between the user interface software and the software encoding the formal methods. A clean separation would facilitate software changes.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 1994
Accession Number
ADA465116

Entities

People

  • Connie Heitmeyer

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Application Software
  • Cognitive Systems Engineering
  • Computers
  • Control Systems
  • Engineering
  • Engineers
  • Feedback
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Language
  • Military Research
  • Notation
  • Simulators
  • Software Design
  • Software Development
  • Specifications
  • User Interface
  • User Interface Engineering

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Software Engineering.