Separation anxiety: Stresses of developing a modern day separable User Interface

The evolution of user interface (UI) tools has generally regarded the UI as separable from the underlying application it represents. This viewpoint leaves the UI having to restate invariants already specified in other subsystems of an application, and any discrepancy between the versions in the UI and those in the subsystems leads to errors. This paper explores a sample of real world subsystems in use by enterprise applications today, and underscores the problem of duplication between them and the UI. It then surveys the prevalence of this issue within mainstream software development.