Malwa: Learnability by Design
摘要
This paper introduces Malwa, a web-based tool implementing our new method of learnability by design that is designed to significantly reduce the main entry hurdle, the design of learning alphabets, for lifelong learning of web applications. Technically, Malwa is based on iHTML, a domain-specific extension of HTML, tailored to instrument the web services’ code in a fashion that releases the quality assurance team from defining any learning alphabet. In fact, deterministic, instrumented, purely client-side web applications can be learned out of the box. Learnability by design is a typical ‘left-shift-technology’: The effort of learning alphabet design is shifted to the GUI-developer. This makes sense for two reasons: She (1) knows the intended interactions points and the way to implement them and (2) has the required technological background. The paper illustrates the impact of learnability by design via a Malwa-based case study. Malwa will be made open source-available for replication, experimentation, and extension.