Visual Based Software Construction: Visual Requirement Authoring tool and Visual Program Generator

Abstract

Most software development errors are caused by incorrect or ambiguous requirement specifications gathered during the requirement elicitation and analysis phase. For the past decades, both academic researchers and software engineers have been seeking better software requirement analysis and representation approaches for overcoming the problem mentioned above. Another equally important issue in software engineering area is how to reduce the cost of developing and maintaining the application software. In this paper, we propose a Visual Based Software Construction Approach that uses the visual based GUI requirement scenario, created by a Visual Requirement Authoring Tool, to depict the requirement of the application software, and then generates the target application software according to the visual requirement scenario obtained in the visual requirement authoring phase. Specifically, the proposed software construction approach supports a Visual Requirement Authoring tool that allows requirement facilitators to produce GUI based requirement scenario and specifications. It also supports a Visual Program Generator that allows programmer to generate the target application system as specified in the visual requirement representation. The target application software can be generated based on the function binding features provided in the Visual Program Generator to bind each GUI component with the associated application function. The proposed approach has been applied to construct a commercial PC camera’s application software. Part of this application example will be illustrated using the proposed approach to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of the proposed approach. The application software development cost and maintenance effort can be reduced while applying the proposed software construction approach. Keyword: Visual requirement, Requirement Scenario, Program generator, Multimedia, Software Construction Methodology.