MORPH Page

Model Oriented Reengineering Process for HCI (MORPH)

MORPH Summary

MORPH is a technique and a toolset that supports user interface reengineering. The current focus of the research is to extract character-oriented user interface models in order to migrate them to graphical user interfaces.

For a one-page description of MORPH, click here

MORPH Description

Information systems are critical to the operations of most businesses, and many of these systems have been maintained over an extended period of time, sometimes twenty years or more. With the advent of client-server technology, open systems, and high-powered graphical workstations, many businesses are choosing to reengineer their critical applications to better fit the needs of the organization and to take advantage of new technologies. In the information systems domain, this frequently entails reengineering applications that run on large mainframes, with character or form-based user interfaces, to environments that require graphical user interfaces. It has been estimated that half or more of the code in an interactive system is devoted to implementing the user interface. User interface code tends to be very platform-dependent, often making it necessary to completely rewrite it when the system is migrated.

The MORPH technique and toolset provide support for extracting user interface components from the legacy code, and expressing them in an abstract model. Program understanding techniques are used to elicit requirements-level information from the code, which is then represented in a knowledge base. Inferencing is then used to choose appropriate objects from a graphical toolkit domain to implement the user interface functionality. Design critic information in the knowledge base ensures the highest quality for the new interface. Understanding the functional requirements of the user interface is an important part of reengineering, and adding MORPH automation to this process substantially reduces the cost and effort for software migration.

Point of Contact

Melody Moore At Georgia Tech:
College of Computing m.s. 0280
801 Atlantic Drive
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0280

E-mail : melody@cc.gatech.edu

Phone :

(404) 894-7081