This is an example of investing in a product and service by a company—Tech- VestCo—that planned to increase its offerings to the larger business technology community. In this example, TechVestCo developed an “intelligent” aid for those who design and field easy-to-use computer-based applications. The idea is simple enough: support the design and development of software applications that are easy to use, which do not frustrate their users and lead to increased human-computer productivity. TechVestCo undertook the design and development of an interactive “workbench” that was intended to help software engineers with the design and development of “friendly” user-computer interfaces.1
TopThe User Interface Workbench
TechVestCo designed and developed a workbench that demonstrated how knowledge-based design can support the design, development, and testing of human-computer interfaces. This workbench demonstrated how a key software engineering activity can be supported by knowledge-based design; at the same time, it also demonstrated how multiple activities can be supported by an interactive knowledge-based software engineering workbench. The platform is extensible to other software engineering activities, such as requirements management, software design, prototyping, and testing.
It was assumed that the workbench had broad commercialization possibilities: there are very few applications that integrate knowledge-based problem-solving with software engineering. Competitors like IBM/Rational have made good progress in the “automation” of some software design processes, but have not fully exploited advances in knowledge-based problem-solving for the design of human-computer interfaces. The workbench project bridged this gap using an “object-attributes-value” knowledge representation methodology (a methodology that is highly extensible to all software engineering processes).
This project assumed that:
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It is possible to leverage software engineering best practices into knowledge bases that can accelerate software design, development, applications, and deployment.
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It is possible to represent the best practices knowledge in objects-attributes-values knowledge base.
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It is possible to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach in a knowledge-based human computer interface (HCI) design, prototyping, and evaluation application.
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It is possible to extend the human-computer interface design process into a knowledge-based interactive application that will support additional software design and development processes.
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It is possible to commercialize the workbench; there are lots of software designers and developers that should be interested in acquiring the workbench to enhance their software design and development efforts.
The application supports user computer interaction designers as they identify user requirements (defined as “tasks”), build interactive prototypes, via the implementation of embedded commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software, and evaluate prototypes to determine whether their features should be implemented in production code.