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  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>June</journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Introducing Usability Requirements in a Test/Model- Driven Web Engineering Method1</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Esteban Robles Luna</string-name>
          <email>esteban.robles@lifia.info.unlp.edu.ar</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Julián Grigera</string-name>
          <email>julian.grigera@lifia.info.unlp.edu.ar</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Gustavo Rossi</string-name>
          <email>gustavo@lifia.info.unlp.edu.ar</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>José Ignacio Panach</string-name>
          <email>jpanach@pros.upv.es</email>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Oscar Pastor</string-name>
          <email>opastor@pros.upv.es</email>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Also at Conicet 3Centro de Investigación en Métodos de Producción de Software Universidad Politécnica de Valencia Camino de Vera</institution>
          <addr-line>s/n, 46022 Valencia</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="ES">Spain</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>LIFIA</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Facultad de Informática, UNLP, La Plata</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="AR">Argentina</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date>
        <year>2009</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>23</volume>
      <issue>2009</issue>
      <fpage>28</fpage>
      <lpage>39</lpage>
      <abstract>
        <p>The success of web applications is constrained by two key features: usability and fast evolution. Current web engineering approaches follow a "unified" development style which tends to be unsuitable for applications that needs to evolve fast. In this paper, we show how to address usability requirements in an agile test/model driven web engineering method. Usability requirements are contemplated from the very beginning of each cycle by creating a set of meaningful tests that drive the development of the application and ensure that no functionality is altered unintentionally through development cycles. The approach is illustrated with an example in the context of the WebML / WebRatio suite.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>1 Introduction</title>
      <p>
        It is not new that Web applications require short development cycles with constantly
changing requirements, and must also be extremely usable to satisfy customers. The
success of this kind of software strongly depends on fulfilling both conditions. This
combination constraints the current trend towards Model-Driven Web Engineering
(MDWE) approaches [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref10 ref17">13, 3, 7, 9, 20</xref>
        ] which include automatic or semi-automatic
code derivation from conceptual models, thus minimizing coding errors and making
the software development faster. However, MDWE approaches tend to use “unified”
rather than agile styles for development, lacking the appeal of other approaches like
extreme programming (XP) [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">11</xref>
        ] or Test-Driven Development (TDD) [2].
      </p>
      <p>
        TDD uses small cycles to add behavior to the application. Each cycle starts by
gathering requirements in the form of use cases [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">10</xref>
        ] or user stories [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">11</xref>
        ] that describe
1 This work has been developed with the support of MEC under the project SESAMO
TIN2007-62894 and co-financed by FEDER
the expected behavior of the application informally. Next, the developer abstracts
concepts and behavior and concretizes them in a set of meaningful test cases. Those
tests should fail on their first run, showing that the application does not meet the
requirements yet. In order to fix this problem, the developer writes the necessary code to
pass the tests and runs them again until the whole test suite passes. The process is
iterative and continues by adding new requirements. In these cycles, the developer can
refactor [8] the code when it is necessary. Studies have shown that TDD reduces the
number of problems found in the implementation stage [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15">18</xref>
        ] and therefore its use is
growing fast in industrial settings [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">14</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>Fig 1: Summary of the approach</p>
      <p>
        We have recently defined an approach which injects a test-driven development
style into a model-driven development life cycle [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">19</xref>
        ]. The basic idea is to apply the
principles of TDD to a MDWE approach. In this manner, tests are run over the
application, but if they fail, changes are applied to the models and not to the code. The
application can be generated again from these models thanks to automatic
transformations, and tests can be run again, continuing with the cycle. We have also defined the
concept of navigation unit testing to extend the well-known concept of unit testing to
the navigation realm. Navigation Unit tests check that a User Interaction Diagram
(UID) is satisfied in the application by testing an interface mockup first and the
derived prototype later. A summarized schema of the approach confronted with
“conventional” TDD is presented in Fig 1.
      </p>
      <p>
        In this paper, we show how to deal with usability requirements in the approach
described above. Usability requirements are requirements that capture the characteristics
to build a usable system for the user. We illustrate the idea with two usability
requirements that have functional implications, in other words, usability requirements that
affect the system architecture. Following requirement guidelines of the literature [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">12</xref>
        ],
a list of usability characteristics that must be considered in an MDWE process are
identified and a set of test cases are generated from them. These tests will lead the
modeling of usability requirements in the same way that traditional TDD leads the
coding phase of functional requirements. The main contributions of the paper are the
following:
• We present a systematic way to deal with usability requirements incrementally.
• We propose using black box interaction tests as essential elements for driving the
development phase and validating usability requirements in a web application.
      </p>
      <p>The structure of the paper is the following: In Section 2 we summarize the
background of our proposal. In Section 3 we present our approach, and using a proof of
concept we explain how we map usability requirements into test models, and how the
cycle proceeds after generating the application. In Section 4 we briefly review some
related work and in Section 5 we conclude and present some further work.
2</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>Background</title>
      <p>Our proposal synergizes two different research approaches: first, the specification of
usability requirements in a Model-Driven Development (MDD) schema and second
the introduction of TDD in MDWE approaches. We briefly discuss the two of them:</p>
      <sec id="sec-2-1">
        <title>2.1 Specifying Usability Requirements</title>
        <p>There is a type of usability recommendations that are related to the system
architecture. These recommendations involve building certain functionalities into the software
to improve user-system interaction. A big amount of rework is needed to include these
features in a software system, unless they are considered from the first stages of the
software development process. The idea of dealing with usability from the early stages
was developed by authors as Bass [1]. Those works propose including the usability
when the system architecture is designed.</p>
        <p>
          The best way of ensuring that usability is taken into account in the architecture
design is dealing with it from the requirements capture step. These requirements lead the
architecture design. In the literature, there are several works to capture usability
requirements. For example, by means of i* models [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref25">28</xref>
          ] or by means of the concept
called usability patterns [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">21</xref>
          ]. According to the proposal of Bass, we have proposed in
previous works [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">17</xref>
          ], a method to include usability features with functional
implications in any MDD approach. The idea is to include new Conceptual Primitives in the
Conceptual Model that represents all usability features.
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-2-2">
        <title>2.2 Bridging TDD and MDWE</title>
        <p>Model-Driven approaches favor the construction of software by handling abstract
models, thus raising the abstraction level over plain source code writing, and leading
to less error-prone applications. On the other hand, agile approaches and their
iterative, short-cycled way of development, result in a very appealing methodology when it
comes to cope with fast change and evolution; both typical of web applications. We
propose a combined methodology that takes the best of both approaches, by
introducing MDD as part of a TDD cycle. The process has the same structure as TDD, but
several artifacts have been adapted/added to fit in MDD approaches. The main
differences with traditional TDD include: using models (for business, navigation and
presentation) instead of code writing, gathering requirements with HTML mockups to
improve communication with stakeholders and developing tests to drive the model
development using a black box testing approach taking advantage of mockups. The
approach includes automated tests that validate functional and usability requirements
and deal with Web refactoring interventions.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>3 An Overview of Our Approach</title>
      <p>Our approach is based on tests that are written before the application is developed.
Tests specify usability requirements in advance so they drive the development phase
and later validate that the application satisfies them. As a first step, we partially
capture user requirements (Sections 3.1 and 3.2), focusing on expected behavior of the
application as well as usability concerns. We next state these requirements as tests
(Section 3.3), and since they are written before the application is developed, we
specify them against UI mockups (stub XHTML pages used to convey application’s
aspects with stakeholders). A running application is then derived using a MDD tool
(Section 3.4), and tests are run against that application. Because tests are written
against mockups, they may not pass due to small differences between the XHTML
mockups and the markup generated by the MDWE tool. Consequently, tests must be
adapted to reflect the final generated layout (Section 3.5). Some usability aspects may
appear after the application has been developed or even deployed. Those changes
involve dealing with existing functionality which may involve refactoring (Section 3.6).
As in TDD, the whole method is repeated with all use cases until a full-featured
prototype is reached.</p>
      <p>We illustrate the approach using TDDStore, a simplified online bookstore.
Specifically, we will validate some usability requirements in the checkout process. This
process will be carried out by the user in order to finish a purchase. In the following
subsections we illustrate the checkout process from capturing requirements to validate the
usability requirements with tests.</p>
      <sec id="sec-3-1">
        <title>3.1 Introducing Usability Requirements</title>
        <p>
          Our work focuses on usability requirements with impact on the architectural design.
This set of usability requirements are referred to as Functional Usability Features
(FUFs) [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">12</xref>
          ]. Examples of these FUFs are providing cancel, undo and feedback
facilities. Each FUF has a set of subtypes called Usability Mechanisms. Each Usability
Mechanism is a different variety of the usability feature. For example the FUF called
Feedback is composed by several Usability Mechanisms, for example: (1) System
Status Feedback: it informs the user about the internal system state; (2) Interaction
Feedback: it informs the user that his request is being processed.
        </p>
        <p>
          In order to capture the requirements for the Usability Mechanisms, we have used a
set of guidelines defined by Juristo [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">12</xref>
          ]. This approach consists of packaging
guidelines that empower developers to capture usability requirements without depending on
a usability expert. These guidelines help developers to understand the implications of
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-2">
        <title>Characteristic</title>
        <p>Service selection</p>
        <p>Steps division
usability requirements in system architecture and know how to elicit and specify
usability features for a system. They have served as a basis for identifying which issues
should be discussed with stakeholders during the elicitation process.</p>
        <p>
          The checkout process is a somewhat a complex process that needs to be followed
by the user. Billing address, delivery address, a summary of the purchase and person
details must be fulfilled in order to finish the purchase. A well known usability
mechanism called Step by step could be applied to break a big, clumsy form, into small and
easy to understand steps. This mechanism helps the user to do tasks that require
different steps with user input. The application of Step by step results in a wizard. From
Juristo’s FUF guidelines [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">12</xref>
          ], we have extracted the usability characteristics that the
analyst must specify in the conceptual model in order to specify the functionality of
the mechanism. Each usability characteristic represents a system property that must be
specified by the analyst. Table 1 shows the characteristics that the analyst must specify
for the Step by step mechanism and their value in the checkout example
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-3">
        <title>Step by step</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-4">
        <title>Value specified by the analyst in the checkout example</title>
        <p>This mechanism will be applied to the checkout action</p>
        <sec id="sec-3-4-1">
          <title>Step description Visual aspect Remaining steps</title>
        </sec>
        <sec id="sec-3-4-2">
          <title>Each step must contain a short description The user has specified the widgets to fill in each step The system must inform about the number of remaining steps</title>
        </sec>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-5">
        <title>3.2 Modeling Functional Requirements</title>
        <p>In order to gather navigation, business and usability requirements from our
stakeholders, we use two kinds of artifacts: User Interaction Diagrams (UIDs) and UI
mockups. UIDs serve as a partial, high-level navigation models, providing abstract
information about interface features. On the other hand, UI mockups help to agree
with the client on broad aspects of the application look and feel. This is a very
convenient way for interacting with stakeholders and gathering quick feedback from them.
We also gain two additional benefits from UI mockups: we can perform our usability
specifications tests against them and they will be used to create the application’s UI.
In Fig 2 we show two mockups of the checkout process:</p>
        <p>Fig 2. UI mockups for steps 2 and 3 of the checkout process.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-6">
        <title>3.3 Defining Tests</title>
        <p>
          Following our approach, usability requirements should also be specified as tests that
ensure usability application. These tests will validate usability requirements at any
stage of the application development. Moreover, they help during application growth,
ensuring that usability characteristic is not altered. To illustrate this stage, we will take
the earlier mentioned requirement (divide checkout into steps) as example. In this test,
we follow the checkout process filling each node with the necessary information and
making assertions about UI and node elements. Using Selenium [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">22</xref>
          ] on Java, the
following test validates that the checkout process is divided into the steps previously
mentioned (Section 3.1 and 3.2). As all MDWE tools derive XHTML/CSS/Javascript
code, Selenium code is agnostic of the MDWE tool used. This test will drive the
development phase of this usability requirement and it looks like we show next:
public class CheckoutTestCase extends SeleneseTestCase {
        </p>
        <p>public void testSuccessfulCheckout() throws Exception {
(01) sel.open("file:///dev/bookstore/Mockups/books-list.html");
(02) sel.clickAndWait(</p>
        <p>"/ul[@id='products']/li[1]/div[1]/div[@id='prod-info']/a“ );
(03) sel.assertLocation("/cart*");
(04) assertEquals(
"The Digital…",
sel.getText("/ul[@id='selected-products']/li[1]/span[1]") );
(05) sel.clickAndWait("checkout");
(06) sel.assertLocation("/checkoutStepShippingAddress");
(07) sel.type("shipping-address", "Calle 58");
(08) sel.select("country", "label=Argentina");
(09) sel.clickAndWait ("//input[@value='product confirmation&gt;&gt;']");
(10) sel.assertLocation("/checkoutStepBillingAddress");
(11) sel.type("billing-address", "Calle 48”);
(12) sel.select("country", "label=Argentina");
(13) sel.clickAndWait ("//input[@value='product confirmation&gt;&gt;']");
(14) sel.assertLocation("/checkoutStepProductConfirmation");
(15) assertEquals(
"The Digital…",
sel.getText("/ul[@id='selected-products']/li[1]/span[1]"));
(16) sel.clickAndWait ("//input[@value='credit card data &gt;&gt;']");
(17) sel.assertLocation("/checkoutStepCreditCardData");
(18) sel.type("first-na","Esteban"); sel.type("last-na", "Robles");
(19) sel.type("card-number", "4246234673479");
(20) sel.select("exp-year", "label=2011");
(21) sel.select("exp-month", "label=Apr");
(22) sel.clickAndWait ("//input[@value='confirmation &gt;&gt;']");
(23) sel.assertLocation("/checkoutSucceed");
(24) assertEquals(
"Checkout succeded”,
sel.getText("/div[@id='message"));
}</p>
        <p>}</p>
        <p>The test opens the book list page (1) and adds an item to the shopping cart (2).
Then we assert that the book has been added and proceed to the checkout process
(35). Shipping information (6-8) and billing information (9-12) are filled and confirmed.
Products are confirmed by asserting that product’s name (13-15). Credit card data is
filled (16-21) and then we confirm the process has succeeded by looking at the text
displayed in a div element (22-2).</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-7">
        <title>3.4 Deriving Design Models</title>
        <p>
          In order to generate incremental prototypes of the application, we have used
WebRatio [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20">23</xref>
          ], a WebML-based MDWE tool. We have specified the different models
(business, navigation and presentation) that will allow to derivate the application. In order
to show the specific aspects of our approach, we focus mainly on the navigational
(hypertext) model, being the distinctive model in Web applications. Besides, we want
to emphasize the differences between typical TDD and TDD in MDWE applications
and show how changes in usability requirements may affect navigation.
        </p>
        <p>
          A first data model is derived using the UIDs as a starting point, identifying the
entities needed to satisfy the specified interactions, e.g. by using the heuristics described
in [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">20</xref>
          ]. As Web Ratio supports the specification of ER models at this stage of the
development, the application behavior will be specified later, in the so-called logic
model. As for the navigational model, we show it with the checkout example.
According to the test written in the previous section, we need to create a step-by-step
checkout. Fig 3 shows this interaction in a WebML interaction model.
        </p>
        <p>Fig 3. Checkout process WebML diagram.</p>
        <p>WebRatio is now ready to generate the application. Once we have a running
prototype, we can adapt the tests (see section 3.5) and run them to check whether the
models (and therefore the application) conform with the requirements or not.</p>
        <p>Finally, we adjust the presentation of the application. WebML does not define a
presentation model; instead, it is considered as a document transformation from a
WebML specification of a page into a specific language page like JSP. In another
methodology, mockups and UIDs would be used to specify the presentation model as
well. Since we already had mockups for our current UID, we just slice up the mockup,
and use it as an XHTML template in WebRatio. We can run the tests again to ensure
interaction is not corrupted while the template is being modified.</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-8">
        <title>3.5 Testing Usability specifications</title>
        <p>
          After building the models, we need to make sure that the implementation generated
from them is valid according to usability requirements specification. As previously
mentioned, if we try to run the tests as they are written, they will fail because they still
reference mockups files and the location of several DOM elements may have changed
(in terms of an XPath expressions [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">26</xref>
          ]). In both cases tests should be adapted to work
with the current implementation as shown in [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref16">19</xref>
          ]. In the first case, URLs in the tests
should be readdressed to the actual location of the generated prototype. On the second
case, the adaptation is easy to perform using a tool like XPather plugin [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref24">27</xref>
          ] for
Mozilla browser. Next we re-run the test and verify whether it succeeds.
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-9">
        <title>3.6. Refactoring to improve Usability</title>
        <p>
          Usability requirements can also appear after the application has been deployed due to
user tests ran at this time. In our example, the user might want to abort the operation
during the checkout process. To support this functionality, we can include Abort
operation, a usability mechanism used to cancel the execution of an action [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">12</xref>
          ].
Therefore, it can be added to each step of the checkout process. As first step for including
Abort operation, we have to detect usability requirements. From the usability
requirements guidelines of this mechanism, we have extracted the characteristics that the
analyst must specify in the conceptual model. The process of requirement capture is done
providing a value for each one of the characteristics of Abort operation (Table 2).
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-10">
        <title>Characteristic</title>
        <p>Service selection
Visual aspect</p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-11">
        <title>Abort operation</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-3-12">
        <title>Value specified by the analyst in the checkout example</title>
        <p>This mechanism will be applied to the checkout action
The abort operation will be triggered by a Cancel button in each step of
the wizard</p>
        <p>In this case we have a test that validates the checkout process (Section 3.5). As the
process involves many steps, we should validate that the abort operation works
successfully on every step. Whether the user is in the first step or in the last one, the abort
operation must cancel the process and remain all products in the shopping cart.</p>
        <p>In order to handle this new usability requirement, we need to adapt existing artifacts
to satisfy it. Following the process, we start by adding the new cancel button to the
existing mockups on every step of the wizard.</p>
        <p>Next, we add tests to validate the checkout process and verify that the buttons exist
and behave as expected: canceling the process and navigating back to the shopping
cart node. In our case, the checkout process is divided into four steps, so we need to
validate that the abort operation works as expected on every one. In order to make the
test works, we follow the checkout process to reach the node under test, next click the
abort button in order to assert that the location has changed to the shopping cart.
Finally, we have to check that the product is still present on the shopping cart. In the
next piece of code, we show a short version of the tests to validate the abort operation:
public class CheckoutTestCase extends SeleneseTestCase {
public void testAbortInShippingAddress() {
this.setupShoppingCartAndStartCheckoutProccess();
this.clickAbortAndCheckLocation();
}
public void testAbortInBillingAddress() {
this.setupShoppingCartAndStartCheckoutProccess();
this.fillShippingAddress();
this.clickAbortAndCheckLocation();
}
public void testAbortInProductConfirmation () {
this.setupShoppingCartAndStartCheckoutProccess();
this.fillShippingAddress(); this.fillBillingAddress();
this.clickAbortAndCheckLocation();
}
public void testAbortInCreditCard() {
this.setupShoppingCartAndStartCheckoutProccess();
this.fillShippingAddress(); this.fillBillingAddress();
this.confirmProducts();
this.clickAbortAndCheckLocation();
}
public void clickAbortAndCheckLocation () {
sel.click("abort-checkout");
sel.waitForPageToLoad("30000");
sel.assertLocation("/cart*");
assertEquals(
"The Digital…",
sel.getText("/ul[@id='selected-products']/li[1]/span[1]"));
}</p>
        <p>}</p>
        <p>Next, the process continues adapting the models in WebRatio. To do so, we add the
necessary links and navigation control for the cancel step functionality. Then, we
derive the application and run the tests against it. Tests could be also adapted if
WebRatio doesn’t fit location and layout issues. If so, we should adapt them in the same way
we did in section 3.5. If tests still fail, then we need to tweak the models and derivate
the application again until all tests pass.</p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>4 Related Work</title>
      <p>
        The aim of this paper is to put together the advantages of using agile approaches in
Web application development [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">15</xref>
        ] and MDWE approaches in Web application
development. Most Web Engineering methods like WebML, UWE, OOHDM, OOWS or
OOH do not support agile approaches. In particular, this paper focuses on the agile
approach called Test-Driven Development where tests are developed before the code
in order to guide the system development. Some works propose generating these tests
automatically, for example the work of Bryc [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref27">30</xref>
        ], while in other works tests are done
manually [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref11">14</xref>
        ]. Both techniques are valid for our proposal.
      </p>
      <p>
        We state that usability must be included in the TDD process from the requirements
capture step. Several authors, as Juristo [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">12</xref>
        ], have dealt with usability as a
requirement. Juristo has defined a set of Functional Usability Features that are related to
system architecture. The requirements of these features are captured by means of
guidelines. These guidelines include questions that the analyst must ask to end-users in
order to adapt the features to users’ requirements. Lauesen [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">16</xref>
        ] also includes usability in
the requirements capture, discussing six different styles of usability specification and
showing how to combine them in a complex real-life case to meet the goals. Finally, it
is important to mention the work of Cysneiros [4], who has defined a catalogue to
guide the analyst through alternatives for achieving usability. The approach is based
on the use of the i* [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref25">28</xref>
        ] framework, having usability modeled as a special type of
goal. The difference between our proposal and the aforementioned works is the
context of use. We deal with usability requirements in a TDD process using an MDWE
approach, while mentioned authors deal with usability requirements in a traditional
software development process.
      </p>
      <p>
        As for including TDD in a Model-Driven Development (MDD) process, it is
important to mention the proposal of Zhang [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref26">29</xref>
        ]. Zhang has defined a process that
involves automatic testing through simulation and using executable models. In other
words, this author has defined a process to create tests that must be applied in a
simulation of the system. This simulation is obtained by the Conceptual Model which
represents the system abstractly. The disadvantage that we have found in Zhang’s
proposal is that tests are not applied to the final code but a simulation. If the final code
differs from the simulation, test results are not useful.
      </p>
      <p>
        A similar work that proposes testing the system by means of Conceptual Models
has been developed by Dinh-Trong [5]. This author has defined a technique for testing
design models that are expressed in the Unified Modeling Language (UML) [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">24</xref>
        ]. Test
cases are generated using information from class diagrams and sequence diagrams.
Our proposal is different to the work of Dinh-Trong. We state that tests must check
the generated code because they are closer to the user. Therefore, users can participate
in the test definition. However, Dinh-Trong proposes testing the system by means of
design models, where users cannot take part for ignorance.
      </p>
      <p>
        Finally, other authors have proposed testing the system in the code generated from
a Conceptual Model, as we propose. The work of Wieczorek [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">25</xref>
        ] is included in that
group. This author proposes a black-box testing that uses structural and behavioral
models, described in UML, to automatically generate test cases. After automatically
generating part of code from the Conceptual Model, developers are starting to create
unit tests for the functions that they are going to implement. Changes derived from
testing are applied directly to the code. This fact differs from our proposal, where
changes are directly applied to the Conceptual Model and the code is automatically
generated, making the software development process more efficient.
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>5 Concluding Remarks and Further Work</title>
      <p>We have presented a novel approach for introducing usability requirements in a test
driven model development approach. Usability characteristics are captured using a set
of guidelines described in natural language. In order to fit these kinds of requirements
in the TDD cycle, we add tests that drive the development and check that the
generated application is valid according to such requirements. The approach maintains the
agile style while dealing with usability requirements in an incremental way.</p>
      <p>
        We are currently working on several directions: First, as usability requirements are
repeated through many applications and hence can be catalogued [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref9">12</xref>
        ], we are creating
template classes for capturing the functionality that has to be tested on each pattern.
The idea is to use or extend these classes to replace all the existing lines on the tests.
Using small “testing” classes as first class objects we can compose and improve the
time of testing creation and also raising the level of abstraction. Second, we are doing
some field experiences with usability requirements on RIA applications [6]. For this
matter we are analyzing how to validate those requirements in tests and where they
should appear in the TDD cycle. Finally, in order to integrate all these features, we are
working on a tool that generates interaction tests from high level UID models and UI
mockups in a semi-automatic way.
      </p>
    </sec>
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