Evaluation of tool support for functional specification of complex systems

To design a sociotechnical and complex system, system designers are in charge of the functional specification because they have an expert knowledge of its operation. However, these experts do not usually have the programming knowledge of those who design the supervision system. To capture the knowledge of the expert on the system and to have more easily verified and validated functional specifications, without training in formal methods, we propose a tool that is inspired by Programming by Example techniques (EBP). This tool is composed of a User Interface (UI) for specification connected to two modules: a generalization module and a function interface generation module. To validate the proposed interface, we have evaluated the usability (ISO 9241-11 and ISO-13407) of the system with real users. To complete our analysis, ergonomic audit on the use of the UI is shown. This paper presents our approach and demonstrates its usability.