Interface Goals Notes
Fall 2014
Jeff Offutt
http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~offutt/
SWE 632
User Interface Design and Development
Summary
• Project submissions should be direct and to the point
– Cover pages are not necessary
• Subjective Satisfaction is whatever comes after the other 4
criteria are accounted for
• Remember what I said on day one of class:
Don’t use the term
“user friendly”
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© Jeff Offutt
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Requirements not Design
• Requirements answer What, Design answers How
– A goal of this assignment was to separate WHAT (requirements) from HOW
(design)
• “The UI will be slower to use than a command line
interface”
– This pre-supposes a design
– This is a common source of system faults that canNOT be found during early
testing ... that is, very expensive
• A common SWE mistake is to not think hard enough or
deep enough about requirements
– This postpones requirements thinking until design and implementation, often
leading to unsolvable problems with the final project
– MISTAKES IN REQUIREMENTS ARE OFTEN UNRECOVERABLE AFTER
IMPLEMENTATION
• A couple of CS 101 slides …
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Software Testing in Real Life
Needs or idea
Requirements
Deployment
System Test
Architecture
Future
Evolution
Unrecoverable,
but Common !!
Disaster!
Full System
Design
CS 101, February 2011
Programming
Integration
Test
Unit Test
Integrate
© Jeff Offutt
Very expensive
Expensive
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English and Writing Notes
• In English, we usually add an s to make a noun plural, and
an apostrophe (’s) to show ownership
–
–
–
–
Actor’s of the system
Actors of the system
The URL’s are entered …
The URLs are entered …
A lot of IT people do this.
It makes us look poorly educated
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English and Writing Notes
• Users(Actors)
• Graphical User Interfaces(GUIs)
• Users (Actors)
• Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)
Always space before left parentheses,
except in mathematical functions [F(x)]
– In Java, this style [while(X<0)] is harder to read and understand,
but programming style is personal preference
– In English it’s wrong
– Don’t let poor programming habits morph into incorrect writing
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English and Writing Notes
• My user will learn their skills
Singular
Plural
This is grammatically wrong !!
• Don’t break grammar to avoid the sexist pronoun
– This turns an annoyance into a problem
• 99 times out of a 100, you can make it plural
– “My users will learn their skills”
– If not, there probably is a real person (singular) who has a gender
– At least “his or her” is grammatically correct
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Now …
You can start
designing !!!!
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© Jeff Offutt
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