Software Tools for Practical Work with Formal Task Descriptions: A Case Study with an Extended GOMS Technique

Abstract

Formal task descriptions are of theoretic interest but have yet to achieve their breakthrough in practical software development. We conjecture that this lack of their use in practice stems to a large extent from the facts that (1) they are tedious and difficult to write, (2) there are no procedures for checking their correctness and (3) they find almost no uses other than for descriptive purposes. For these reasons, they are presently not economical for use in real software development. In this paper we motivate and describe the design and implementation of a set of tools in the form of dialog systems for alleviating these problems. The complete package, which allows practical work with an extended GOMS technique, consists of about 10.000 lines of C and Presentation Manager code running on an IBM PS/2 under OS/2.