Congratulation. You have done a very good job.

Cheers!
Jair

Many Many Congratulations for your Ph.D!

Thank you for your feedback. It emphasizes the importance of the topic. We hope we could contribute somehow to your reflections in order to change for better the way how people look at models today and beyond.

I totally agree with you sentence : “If you have the chance to describe how people perform [...]
you will see that time and money are actually saved.” Models (e.g., descriptions of something) are something to enhance productivity, comprehension, documentation and, I hope software maintenance and evolution. Current work on Model Driven Engineering(MDE) already shown the gain in productivity of models. But as you said, it is still not convenient in all cases : ” Don’t force companies to change what they already have established”.

For sure Task model (as Patterno describe it) is not convenient for any case. It is supposed to be quite independent from the actual interaction (e.g., 3D, vocal, etc.). For example describing vocal interaction (where all task are accessible by keyword) gives a unclear linear model. I mean the problem of Task model is that is is more or less a “tree” (Some UML state-charts, activity diagram can gives support to express interaction).

Finally, I strongly agree with your statement : ” However, when a specific context of application is chosen then the task model can be refined to address specific needs”. The clue of the problem may be to design a Domain Specific Language (DSL) which ease the description of specific needs. But DSL itself don’t solve the problem, you’ll need to have a really efficient modelling framework to support this.