DRT: A Tool for Design Recovery of Interactive Graphical Applications

Abstract

Nowadays, the majority of productivity applications are interactive and graphical in nature. In this demonstration, we explore the possibility of taking advantage of these two characteristics in a design recovery tool. Specifically, the fact that an application is interactive means that we can identify distinct execution bursts corresponding closely to "actions" performed by the user. The fact that the application is graphical means that we can describe those actions visually from a fragment of the application display itself. Combining these two ideas, we obtain an explicit mapping from high-level actions performed by a user (similar to use case scenarios/specification fragments) to their low-level implementation. This mapping can be used for design recovery of interactive graphical applications. We demonstrate our approach using L/sub Y/X, a scientific word processor.