Transformations Between Specifications of Requirements and User Interfaces

Separating requirements from user interface specifications often leads to unusable systems or to systems that do not support the users’ needs. We address this issue by introducing explicit transformations between models of these different “worlds”. In fact, we show how to transform artifacts in a model specifying requirements to artifacts in a model specifying a user interface, and vice versa (inverse transformations). We also transform from a more abstract to a more concrete model of a user interface, and vice versa. In effect, this allows starting either from requirements and getting support for transforming to a user interface, or from a user interface prototype and getting support for transforming to requirements.