Using Formal Specifications in the Design of a HumanComputer Interface.pdfVIP

Using Formal Specifications in the Design of a Human-Computer Interface Robert J.K. Jacob Naval Research Laboratory ABSTRACT Formal specification techniques have been valuable in software development because they permit a designer to describe the external behavior of a system precisely without specifying its internal implementation. While they have been applied to many areas of software systems, formal specifications have not been widely used for specify- ing user interfaces. In the Military Message System project at the Naval Research Laboratory, the user interfaces (as well as the other components) of a family of mes- sage systems are being specified formally, and prototypes are then being implemented from the specifications. This paper illustrates the specification of the user interface module for the family of message systems. It then surveys specification techniques that can be applied to human-computer interfaces and divides the techniques into two categories: those based on state transition diagrams and those based on BNF. Exam- ples of both types of specifications are given. Specification notations based on state transition diagrams are found to be preferable to those based on BNF because the former capture the surface structure of the user interfac