Software Engineering Institute

This technical note brings together two different threads of work: (1) investigating the relationship between usability and software architecture that has generated a number of usability scenarios with implications for software architecture and (2) developing an architecture design assistant, Architecture Expert (ArchE). One key element of ArchE is that quality attribute knowledge can be encapsulated into reasoning frameworks, and a Carnegie Mellon University Master of Software Engineering project team has developed an ArchE reasoning language (ARL) with which to specify the actions of reasoning frameworks within ArchE. 

This note describes an ARL implementation of two usability scenarios: (1) displaying progress feedback and (2) allowing cancel. These implementations begin to provide ArchE with the ability to reason about aspects of usability that have software architecture implications.