Conference Draft for REFSQ’01, June 4-5 2001, Interlaken, Switzerland Round-Trip Prototyping for the Validation of Requirements Specifications

The new millennium opens with an increasing diversity of computerized devices comprising an increasing diversity of interaction styles used by an increasing diversity of user groups. Thus the incorporation of user interface requirements into software requirements specifications becomes more and more mandatory. Validating these requirements specifications with hand made, throw away prototypes is not only expensive, but also bears the danger that validation results are not sufficiently taken into account in the updated requirements specification. In this paper we propose an enhancement of a UMLbased requirements specification for an explicit capturing of user interface requirements. The advantages of the approach are twofold. First, presentation prototypes for validation purposes can semi-automatically be generated. Second, the model based construction of presentation prototypes allows for “round-trip prototyping“ such that manual changes of the prototype during the validation process are automatically fed back into the requirements specification.