Evaluating the Effectiveness of Problem Frames for Contextual Modeling of Cyber-Physical Systems: a Tool Suite with Adaptive User Interfaces

Abstract

Bridging the gap between academic research and industrial application is an important issue to promote Jackson's Problem Frames approach (PF) to the software engineering community. Various attempts have been made to tackle this problem, such as defining formal semantics of PF for software development, and providing a semi-formal approach to model transformations of problem diagrams, with automated tool support. In this paper, we propose to exclusively focus on exploring and evaluating the effectiveness of Jackson's problem diagrams for modeling the context of cyber-physical systems, by developing a suite of support tools enhanced with adaptive user interfaces, and empirically and comprehensively assess its usability. This paper introduces the state of the art, corresponding research questions, research methodologies and current progress of our research.