Towards modeling context-sensitive interactive applications: the context-sensitive user interface profile (CUP)

Abstract

The construction of software systems is becoming increasingly complex because of the changing environments the software is supposed to function in. Taking into account the context of use, how the system reacts and anticipates changes in its working environment, is important for a wide range of applications, such as mobile services for example. Model-driven design is already widely accepted as a software engineering methodology to cope with these new type of requirements. This approach is known both in software engineering (e.g. model-driven architecture) as in the design of user interfaces (model-based user interface development), but although they target the same deficiencies from traditional approaches, there is still a gap between both. New modeling elements are necessary that allow the designer to make both context of use and user interactions explicit in the design phase and to create context-sensitive software that will be more robust and usable. We extend the UML 2.0 notation to address the aforementioned issues and present extensions to support the modeling of context-sensitive interactive applications. These extensions are defined in a new UML profile that can easily be used in existing modeling environments.