Context:
The interface development is increasing in complexity and applications with a lot of functionalities that are reliable, understandable and easy to use have to be developed. To be able to compete, the time-to-market has to be short and cost effective.
The development process is important and there are a lot of aspects that can be improved. The needs of the development and the knowledge among the developers are key factors. Here code reuse, standardization and the usability of the development tool plays an important role which could have a lot of positive impact on the development process and the quality of the final product.
Objectives:
A framework for describing important properties for HMI development tools is presented. A representative collection of two development tools are selected, described and based on the experiences from the case study its applicability is mapped to the evaluation framework.
Methods:
Interviews were made with HMI developers to get information from the field. Following that, a case study of two different development tools were made to highlight the pros and cons of each tool.
Results:
The properties presented in the evaluation framework are that the toolkit should be open for multiple platforms, accessible for the developer, it should support custom templates, require non-extensive coding knowledge and be reusable. The evaluated frameworks shows that it is hard to meet all the demands.
Conclusions:
To find a well suited development toolkit is not an easy task. The choice should be made depending on the needs of the HMI applications and the available development resources.
Source: Blekinge Institute of Technology
Author: Andersson, Linda