Dialogue Validation from Task Analysis

Up today, formal methods have mainly been used to allow designers to verify that software conforms to its specification. In this article, we propose a validation method and a tool to analyse whether the design actually fulfils the original requirements for the system. The principle of our validation method is to generate the complete set of possible user interaction sequences from the task analysis. Then, this set is injected in the Dialogue Controller Component of the application. At last, the Dialogue Controller Component’s calls to the Functional Core are intercepted, and compared with the user's goals. Our case study is in the general Computer-Aided Design area, in which systems support a huge number of tasks.