User-Centred Requirements for Software Engineering Environments

This volume is based on a NATO Advanced Research Workshop on User-Centred Requirements for Software Engineering Environments held in Bonas, France, in September 1991. The workshop was organized in two halves, one dominated by discussion of usability problems in software engineering and the other by discussion of existing solutions to these problems. The papers in the volume are grouped under four themes: - Design activities and representations for design - Code representation and manipulation - Technological solutions - The impact of design methods and new programming paradigms.

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The idea for this workshop originated when I came across and read Martin Zelkowitz's book on Requirements for Software Engineering Environments (the proceedings of a small workshop held at the University of Maryland in 1986). Although stimulated by the book I was also disappointed in that it didn't adequately address two important questions - "Whose requirements are these?" and "Will the environment which meets all these requirements be usable by software engineers?". And thus was the decision made to organise this workshop which would explicitly address these two questions. As time went by setting things up, it became clear that our workshop would happen more than five years after the Maryland workshop and thus, at the same time as addressing the two questions above, this workshop would attempt to update the Zelkowitz approach. Hence the workshop acquired two halves, one dominated by discussion of what we already know about usability problems in software engineering and the other by discussion of existing solutions (technical and otherwise) to these problems. This scheme also provided a good format for bringing together those in the HeI community concerned with the human factors of software engineering and those building tools to solve acknowledged, but rarely understood problems.