Programming from specifications (2nd ed.)
Programming from specifications (2nd ed.)
Communicating sequential processes
Communications of the ACM - Special 25th Anniversary Issue
Program development by stepwise refinement
Communications of the ACM
µ-Chart-Based Specification and Refinement
ICFEM '02 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods: Formal Methods and Software Engineering
Formal Refinement of Informal GUI Design Artefacts
ASWEC '06 Proceedings of the Australian Software Engineering Conference
Using formal models to design user interfaces: a case study
BCS-HCI '07 Proceedings of the 21st British HCI Group Annual Conference on People and Computers: HCI...but not as we know it - Volume 1
Developing usability studies via formal models of UIs
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering interactive computing systems
UI-design driven model-based testing
Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering
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Formal approaches to software development require that we correctly describe (or specify) systems in order to prove properties about our proposed solution prior to building it. We must then follow a rigorous process to transform our specification into an implementation to ensure that the properties we have proved are retained. Different transformation, or refinement, methods exist for different formal methods, but they all seek to ensure that we can guide the transformation in a way which preserves the desired properties of the system. Refinement methods also allow us to subsequently compare two systems to see if a refinement relation exists between the two. When we design and build the user interfaces of our systems we are similarly keen to ensure that they have certain properties before we build them. For example, do they satisfy the requirements of the user? Are they designed with known good design principles and usability considerations in mind? Are they correct in terms of the overall system specification? However, when we come to implement our interface designs we do not have a defined process to follow which ensures that we maintain these properties as we transform the design into code. Instead, we rely on our judgement and belief that we are doing the right thing and subsequent user testing to ensure that our final solution remains useable and satisfactory. We suggest an alternative approach, which is to define a refinement process for user interfaces which will allow us to maintain the same rigorous standards we apply to the rest of the system when we implement our user interface designs.