Key Activities for a Development Methodology of Interactive Applications

Abstract

User Interface (UI) development tools (e.g., toolboxes, user interface management systems), design guides and guidelines provide essential support for interactive systems development, but they are not enough in isolation, since no fruitful outcome of an interactive application development process can be guaranteed. Ideally, development methodologies for interactive business applications should combine searching analyses of business processes, with design models and appropriate development tools that impose structure on development and guarantee high quality solutions, in both their technical and ergonomic aspects. This ideal may be Utopian. A more feasible and profitable goal is for a methodology’s phases to satisfy some minimal properties. Such properties require key activities to be integrated into development methodologies for interactive systems. Each activity can ensure coherent integration of the outputs of different phases, preserving these through subsequent phases without loss of information, yet entailing no further work. Each activity supports the convergence of development phases at a satisfactory solution.