A responsibility-based pattern language for usability-supporting architectural patterns

Bonnie E. John, Len Bass, Elspeth Golden, Pia Stoll. A responsibility-based pattern language for usability-supporting architectural patterns. In T. C. Nicholas Graham, Gaëlle Calvary, Philip D. Gray, editors, Proceedings of the 1st ACM SIGCHI symposium on Engineering Interactive Computing System , EICS 2009, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, July 15-17, 2009. pages 3-12, ACM, 2009. [doi]

Abstract

Usability-supporting architectural patterns (USAPs) were developed as a way to explicitly connect the needs of architecturally-sensitive usability concerns to the design of software architecture. In laboratory studies, the Cancellation USAP was shown to significantly improve the quality of architecture designs for supporting the ability to cancel a long-running command, sparking interest from a large industrial organization to develop new USAPs and apply them to their product line architecture design. The challenges of delivering the architectural information contained in USAPs to practicing software architects led to the development of a pattern language for USAPs based on software responsibilities and a web-based tool for evaluating an architecture with respect to those patterns.