Semi Automatic Generation of User Interface Prototypes From Early Requirement Models

When a software product is designed and implemented, it is very important to assure from the beginning that the user requirements have been properly represented. A guided software production process that starts with the initial activities of requirements engineering and carries them through the resultant software product is needed to achieve this goal. However, there are currently few development environments that put forward a methodological approach to do this. The objective of this chapter is to define a software production process, which represents the correspondence between the primitive elements of a business model (represented in the framework i*) and the user interface of the software system. The representation of the user interface is compliant with the Unified Model Language (UML). We use a use case model as an intermediary between the business requirements and the application software. By doing this, we go a step further in the process of properly embedding early requirements engineering into the software production process, because organizational users can validate their requirements as early as possible. This is done through the validation of the user interfaces, which are generated as a software representation of these requirements. These interfaces can also be reused for further refinement as a useful starting point in the software development process.