GUI - Enhanced Activity Diagrams with Application to the Design of AVISTED

摘要

Software design is worthwhile if it paves the way to a good and useful functional software. In this paper, we propose a new tool entitled GUI-Enhanced Activity diagrams (GEAD). This tool facilitates a new approach of software design consisting of UML activity diagrams with links to their respective interface snapshots. Notably, GEAD is more efficient for web applications that have numerous graphical user interfaces. To illustrate GEAD, we introduce a new toolset entitled 'Analysis and Visualization Toolset for Environmental Data' (AVISTED). AVISTED is a generic web-based visualization toolset which is used by climate researchers for visualizing large climate datasets. This paper introduces the design aspects of AVISTED by leveraging the concepts and strategies of GEAD. The links between the designs of the webpages and the activities in UML diagrams help showing clear connections between the backend and frontend activities. This comprehensive view helps developing the desired software that meets the user requirements more efficiently by improving collaboration and decreasing development time.