Engineering information management tools by example

While there are many established methodologies for information systems development, designing by example has not been formally explored and applied previously. Our work is also motivated by the desire to explore interface-driven development techniques that could complement existing approaches such as model-driven engineering with the goal of reducing the need for modelling and reengineering of existing applications and interfaces, while still supporting the development task. We explore the example-based technique for rapid development of powerful and flexible information management tools based on the example of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, a system that was originally designed to support the workflow of digital photographers in a flexible way. We analyse experiments in which two new systems---one for managing collections of research papers and another for software project management---were developed based on the Lightroom paradigm. We derive a conceptual framework for engineering by example and assess the method by comparing it to traditional model-driven engineering.