Reverse Engineering User-Drawn Form-Based Interfaces for Interactive Database Conceptual Analysis

In this paper, we address the problem of eliciting, communicating and validating the static data requirements of a software engineering project, while improving the end-user involvement. For this purpose, given an environment for which electronic forms are a privileged way to exchange information and stakeholders familiar with form-based (computer) interaction, we propose to use form-based user-drawn interfaces as a two-way channel to interactively capture and validate static data requirements with end-users, by specializing and integrating standard techniques to help acquire data specifications from existing artifacts. Since the main principles of our approach are already presented in [1], we here focus on discussing two fundamental aspects of this research, namely the means to make end-users major stakeholders in the data requirements process, and the challenges facing the validation of such a transversal research.