User Interfaces supporting the Software Process Hans-Ulrich Kobialka Claus Lewerentz GMD, Schloß Birlinghoven Technical University of Cottbus D-53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany Postbox 10 13 44 D-03013 Cottbus, Germany email: kobialka@gmd.de lewerentz@informatik.tu-cottbus.de Abstract: User interfaces determine the process support that is really delivered to the user. In order to support a process effectively, individually tailored user interfaces have to be provided. Most process centered soft- ware engineering environments (PSEEs) provide predefined user inter- faces, but only low-level languages which can be used by customers to build process-specific user interfaces. This paper describes how user interfaces can be specified in the ADDD PSEE, and how these interfaces support the user during process enact- ment. 1 Introduction During process enactment, the quality of a PSEE’s user interface strongly influences the user acceptance of process technology. If someone would ask “How can we gain more productivity? Should we improve the process program or the user interfaces?”, we sup- pose that in most cases the answer should be “Improve the user interface!”. We claim that each process step has to be supported by a dedicated user interface. There may be universal browsing tools and powerful command or query interfaces, but effective process support requires actions to be performed with a minimum of manual input. As a prerequisite, the information needed for the actions must be retrieved and displayed automatically. This can be only achieved by a user interface which is explic- itly designed for the particular process step. In this paper, we discuss two questions: 1. How should user interfaces be built and integrated with a process engine? 2. What are good examples of process-sensitive user interfaces? Answering the second question requires many examples and discussions. There won’t be “the best” user interface even for a specific process step, but in order to find appro- priate solutions, one has to know many approaches. In section 3, we introduce the var- ious interfaces which are supported by a PSEE called ADDD, and discuss their rationale and the underlying technical concepts. Section 2 debates general issues of user inter- faces and PMLs, and section 4 summarizes our conclusions on this topic.