I was only able to attend a couple hours of the REV workshop. I listened to about three talks on various types of visualizations. The papers were primarily focused on visualizations for product lines. There were some interesting discussions around modeling decisions visually.

The talks were:

• David Sellier presented Visualising Product Line Requirement Selection Decision Inter-dependencies
• Reinhard Stoiber presented Visualizing Product Line Domain Variability by Aspect-oriented Modeling
• Tobias Reinhard presented An Improved Fisheye Zoom Algorithm for Visualizing and Editing Hierarchical Models

As we approached my particular presentation, I was honestly quite concerned that my talk would not be very interesting to the group based on my observations of the talks before me. All of their content was much more…academic, and I’ll just leave it at that! But alas it was my turn. The paper I presented I wrote with Mike Alexander is titled Display-Action-Response Model for User Interface Requirements: Case Study. You can find more about this model here, though you’ll see we renamed the model when we worked through the paper! Anyway, I presented our paper and corresponding poster and expected very few questions for some reason. But I was pleasantly surprised. The audience was very much listening and had fantastic questions for me. Most of their questions focused around how you handle types of complicated scenarios in which elements of one user interface are based on states of another and whether we had considered formalizing the language instead of using natural language. They also had questions around whether we’d had any luck with putting this in a requirements tool yet. During the break I had more great feedback on the model from a couple people in academia who really wanted to know if we were planning to continue research and develop some tools for it.

In the end, I definitely found the REET workshop much more practical for where we are as an organization. However, I intend to look back at the presentations I missed in the REV workshop to see if there was more there that was applicable to us than I saw in the small bit I attended.