The untrained eye: How languages for software specification support understanding in untrained users

It is generally recognized that choice of languages can have a significant effect on the system development process, particularly in the early stages. In the development of interactive systems, it is essential that all stakeholders are able to participate in a meaningful way. To do this, they must be able to understand representations of key concepts produced by the developers, especially those relating to problems and requirements for the system. Some stakeholders, such as clients and potential users of the system, may be unfamiliar with the languages used by system developers. They may, therefore, find it difficult to understand representations produced using such languages well enough to give useful feedback to the developer. In this article, we identify the ease of understanding representations as a key issue for interactive system development and consider how the notion ease of understanding may be defined in this context. We then discuss an approach to evaluating software specification languages in terms of properties that may affect the understandability of representations and that may be amenable to objective measurement. Our intention is to use the results of this work to (a) help to classify existing languages in terms of ease of understanding, (b) provide a rational basis for predicting understandability in proposed new languages, and (c) help developers to use current languages in more imaginative ways so that they can produce representations that are easier to understand.