Prism : a life cycle to align user interface and software developments based on a linguistic perspective

While Software Engineering (SE) is primarily concerned with developing software products, Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is primarily concerned with the User Interface (UI) of these products striving for its quality, such as usability. Therefore, integrating both disciplines is key to develop usable software products. The effort to align activities from both domains started since HCI emerged as a discipline in the early 80s. Yet, such an alignment proved to be a hard goal to reach. Consequently, valuable HCI contributions and models are not considered by the software industry as they could be. In order to address the aforementioned challenge, this thesis analyzes different approaches to align HCI and SE in order to identify the root cause that is hampering the alignment effort. It follows a Root Cause Analysis methodology that helps, not only to identify the root cause, but also to propose a solution for it. This thesis suggests the linguistic perspective as an alternative to common UI development which does not foster creating a concrete UI during the early phases (such as analysis), while the linguistic perspective enables this possibility by materializing linguistic levels (i.e., goal, pragmatic, semantic, syntactical, lexical, alphabetical) that are already analyzed into a partial yet concrete UI. This change of perspective implies several changes to other HCI concepts which are discussed in this thesis: how a user interface can be developed from a linguistic perspective. For this purpose, this thesis proposes a linguistic UI development language (the Prism Programming Language). Moreover, it explores modeling approaches from the linguistic perspective, proposes a linguistic modeling framework and instantiates a graphical UI linguistic model from it. Furthermore, it develops the Prism Development Life Cycle (Prism-DLC) that can be instantiated in different software DLCs, such as agile methods. The Prism-DLC allows aligning SE and HCI in the right way to develop a usable software. By fostering different way of thinking, this thesis steps forwards towards a shift in the UI paradigm by fostering a different way of thinking. The UI linguistic paradigm to common UI paradigm is like object oriented programming to procedural programming.