Automatic generation of task-oriented help

This work presents an approach to the design of the software component of an Interactive System, which supports the generation of automatic task-oriented help. Help can easily be generated from the abstract formal specification of the associated system without any further effort. The architectural description is obtained in a task-driven way, where tasks are specified by indicating temporal ordering constraints using operators of a concurrent formal notation. The association of user tasks with software interaction objects, which inherit constraints of related tasks, gives the information to structure task-oriented help in an immediate way. The help given is thus more expressive with a consequent improvement in the usability of an Interactive System.