Model-Driven Instrumentation of Graphical User Interfaces

In today´s continuously changing markets newly developed products often do not meet the demands and expectations of customers. Research on this problem identified a large gap between developer and user expectations. Approaches to bridge this gap are to provide the developers with better information on product usage and to create a fast feedback cycle that helps tackling usage problems. Therefore, the user interface of the product, the central point of human-computer interaction, has to be instrumented to collect accurate usage data which serves as basis for further improvement steps. This paper presents a novel engineering approach that combines model-driven user interface development and flexible instrumentation with runtime monitoring. In its application, it enables observation integration into products which provides comprehensive data about usage and thus allows for fast feedback cycles and consequently increased software quality. A case-study demonstrates the applicability of this approach.