Integrating HCI concerns into a UML based software engineering course

Abstract

Software Engineering (SE) and HCI (Human Computer Interaction) are not the same age, do not have the same history, background or foundations, and did never share design principles and design models. The separation principle, by encouraging separate concerns and techniques to design the interactive and the computational layers of a software system - despite being absolutely correct from several SE crucial design principles, like modularity, separation of concerns, encapsulation, context independence and so on -, has sometimes been misjudged and mistakenly used. Therefore, instead of bridging the gap between the two separate de- signs, it helped widening that gap. However, the principle does not mention and does not impose any restrictions on how the integration should be done. In the context of a software engineering course the authors have been involved with for some years, the need has arisen to provide students with HCI skills. Several attempts at integrating HCI into software engineering can be found in the literature. However, none seemed amenable to application in the context of the course, basically because none of them could be taught and learnt in such a way (methodology) that could easily be blent into the software engineering design process. We present a methodological process that we have been teaching that aims at shortening the gap that software engineering students face when trying to adapt SE techniques to the interactive layer.