A Method for Extracting Requirements that a User Interface Prototype Contains

User interface (UI) prototyping (UIPing) (Connell and Shafer 1989, 1995) is a commonly employed requirements elicitation and validation technique, used to determine the functionality, UI, data structure, and other characteristics of a system. User requirements are explored through experimental development, demonstration, refinement, and iteration. The UI prototype (UIP) is built during the requirements analysis and specification phases of a software project. The goal of UIPing is to discover user requirements through early implementation of the UI and the functionality behind it. A UIP permits users to relate to something tangible and to obtain a requirements definition that is as complete as possible, so that the requirements can be validated by the user on the basis of realistic examples. The products of this process are various documents such as a software requirements specification (SRS), an occupation analysis document (OAD), and the prototype itself. (An OAD is essentially a draft version of a tutorial and user’s manual for the system to be built.) The process of creating a UIP involves some difficulties. Once the prototype is developed and agreed upon, how is the information that it contains captured and represented in the other analysis documents?