A Model for Dealing with Usability in a Holistic MDD Method

Currently, the importance of developing usable software is widely known. For this reason, there are many usability recommendations related to system functionality (called functional usability features). If these functional usability features are not considered from the very early steps of the software development, they require many changes in the system architecture. However, the inclusion of usability features from the early steps in a traditional software development process increases the analyst’s workload, who must consider not only features of the business logic but also usability features. In the Software Engineering community, holistic MDD methods are a solution to reducing the analysts’ workload since analysts can focus all their efforts on the conceptual model (problem space), relegating the architecture design and the implementation code (solution space) to automatic transformations. However, in general, MDD methods do not provide primitives for representing usability features. In this paper, we propose what we call a Usability Model that gathers conceptual primitives to represent functional usability features abstractly enough to be included in any holistic MDD method.