Visual based software construction: Visual requirement authoring tool and visual program generator

Most software development errors are caused by incorrect or ambiguous specifications gathered during the requirement elicitation and analysis phase. For the past two decades, both academic researchers and software engineers have been seeking better software requirement analysis and representation approaches in order to overcome this problem. Another equally important issue in software engineering is reducing the cost of developing and maintaining application software. Here we propose a visual based software construction approach that uses multimedia requirement scenarios created by a visual requirement authoring tool to depict application software requirements. It also supports a visual program generator that allows system developers to generate target application systems as specified in multimedia requirement scenarios. The target application software can be generated based on the function binding feature provided in the visual program generator. Evidence is presented showing that application software development and maintenance costs can be reduced by applying the proposed software construction approach.