A Specification for Designing Requirement Prioritization Artifacts

The importance of prioritizing requirements stems from the fact that not all requirements can usually be met with available time and resource constraints. Although several papers have been published in this domain, they mainly focus on descriptive research endeavors to suggest different requirement prioritization approaches. Prescriptive research dealing with design science for a systematic and holistic understanding of the prioritization process is still scarce. The gap motivates our research, which aims at arriving at a set of design principles that explains the form and function of software requirement prioritization artifacts. We resort to a non-experimental approach using content analysis to identify and analyze articles on requirement prioritization published up to 2009 in order to arrive at the set of initial design principles. This subsequently is evaluated based on expert feedbacks. We close the paper by indicating our research continuation plans, and highlighting issues for future considerations

Business models for sustained ehealth implementation: lessons from two continents

There is general consensus that Computers and Information Technology have the potential to enhance health systems applications, and many good examples of such applications exist all over the world. Unfortunately, with respect to eHealth and telemedicine, there is much disillusionment and scepticism. This paper describes two models that were developed separately, but had the same purpose, namely to facilitate a holistic approach to the development and implementation of eHealth solutions. The roadmap of the Centre for eHealth Research (CeHRes roadmap) was developed in the Netherlands, and the Telemedicine Maturity Model (TMMM) was developed in South Africa. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the commonalities and differences of these approaches, and to explore how they can be used to complement each other. The first part of this paper comprises of a comparison of these models in terms of origin, research domain and design principles. Case comparisons are then presented to illustrate how these models complement one another

Preserving faith with conservation: An investigation into the sufficiency of collection care provision within the Church of England parish church, and recommendations for its improvement

Though the parish churches of the Church of England (CofE) collectively hold in their object collections cultural property of such quality and significance as to make them the envy of some museums, there is presently little coherent provision for the care of these collections, or written guidance on what such provisions should be, or do. Taking the collections of the consecrated churches of the Diocese of Lincoln as its point of reference this study explores the current provisions for collection care available to CofE churches and makes recommendations for how these could be improved upon. Research methods include qualitative and quantitative survey input from church users, qualitative interviews with representatives of the CofE and heritage professions, primary and secondary case studies, theoretical sources from within and without the heritage field, and third-party organisational management and project management theories. Reference is made throughout to the contextual importance of the three primary stakeholders in church conservation: the CofE, church users, and the conservation profession. An analysis of sufficiency first shows that there is a necessity to improve collection care in churches, whilst an assessment of need formalises what is required to do so. A discussion of the scope that these improvements should cover leads to the conclusion that the key to sufficient collection care in churches lies in effective decision-making, whereby all avenues of thought are given equal weighting, for the collective and sustainable benefit of the objects, their users and the organisation. Recommendations are made for practical ways in which church collection care could be improved upon, supported by reference to the notional considerations which should underpin any such solutions. In initiating research into an as yet largely under-represented field of conservation study, this paper will contribute to future research into similar topics, and facilitate future phases of development in the field of church collection care

Integrating IVHM and Asset Design

Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) describes a set of capabilities that enable effective and efficient maintenance and operation of the target vehicle. It accounts for the collection of data, conducting analysis, and supporting the decision-making process for sustainment and operation. The design of IVHM systems endeavours to account for all causes of failure in a disciplined, systems engineering, manner. With industry striving to reduce through-life cost, IVHM is a powerful tool to give forewarning of impending failure and hence control over the outcome. Benefits have been realised from this approach across a number of different sectors but, hindering our ability to realise further benefit from this maturing technology, is the fact that IVHM is still treated as added on to the design of the asset, rather than being a sub-system in its own right, fully integrated with the asset design. The elevation and integration of IVHM in this way will enable architectures to be chosen that accommodate health ready sub-systems from the supply chain and design trade-offs to be made, to name but two major benefits. Barriers to IVHM being integrated with the asset design are examined in this paper. The paper presents progress in overcoming them, and suggests potential solutions for those that remain. It addresses the IVHM system design from a systems engineering perspective and the integration with the asset design will be described within an industrial design process

Integrating IVHM and asset design

Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) describes a set of capabilities that enable effective and efficient maintenance and operation of the target vehicle. It accounts for the collecting of data, conducting analysis, and supporting the decision-making process for sustainment and operation. The design of IVHM systems endeavours to account for all causes of failure in a disciplined, systems engineering, manner. With industry striving to reduce through-life cost, IVHM is a powerful tool to give forewarning of impending failure and hence control over the outcome. Benefits have been realised from this approach across a number of different sectors but, hindering our ability to realise further benefit from this maturing technology, is the fact that IVHM is still treated as added on to the design of the asset, rather than being a sub-system in its own right, fully integrated with the asset design. The elevation and integration of IVHM in this way will enable architectures to be chosen that accommodate health ready sub-systems from the supply chain and design trade-offs to be made, to name but two major benefits. Barriers to IVHM being integrated with the asset design are examined in this paper. The paper presents progress in overcoming them, and suggests potential solutions for those that remain. It addresses the IVHM system design from a systems engineering perspective and the integration with the asset design will be described within an industrial design process

RE-centric Recommendations for the Development of Trustworthy(er) Autonomous Systems

Complying with the EU AI Act (AIA) guidelines while developing and implementing AI systems will soon be mandatory within the EU. However, practitioners lack actionable instructions to operationalise ethics during AI systems development. A literature review of different ethical guidelines revealed inconsistencies in the principles addressed and the terminology used to describe them. Furthermore, requirements engineering (RE), which is identified to foster trustworthiness in the AI development process from the early stages was observed to be absent in a lot of frameworks that support the development of ethical and trustworthy AI. This incongruous phrasing combined with a lack of concrete development practices makes trustworthy AI development harder. To address this concern, we formulated a comparison table for the terminology used and the coverage of the ethical AI principles in major ethical AI guidelines. We then examined the applicability of ethical AI development frameworks for performing effective RE during the development of trustworthy AI systems. A tertiary review and meta-analysis of literature discussing ethical AI frameworks revealed their limitations when developing trustworthy AI. Based on our findings, we propose recommendations to address such limitations during the development of trustworthy AI.Comment: Accepted at [TAS '23]{First International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems

Maps of Lessons Learnt in Requirements Engineering

Both researchers and practitioners have emphasized the importance of learning from past experiences and its consequential impact on project time, cost, and quality. However, from the survey we conducted of requirements engineering (RE) practitioners, over 70\% of the respondents stated that they seldom use RE lessons in the RE process, though 85\% of these would use such lessons if readily available. Our observation, however, is that RE lessons are scattered, mainly implicitly, in the literature and practice, which obviously, does not help the situation. We, therefore, present ``maps” of RE lessons which would highlight weak (dark) and strong (bright) areas of RE (and hence RE theories). Such maps would thus be: (a) a driver for research to ``light up” the darker areas of RE and (b) a guide for practice to benefit from the brighter areas. To achieve this goal, we populated the maps with over 200 RE lessons elicited from literature and practice using a systematic literature review and survey. The results show that approximately 80\% of the elicited lessons are implicit and that approximately 70\% of the lessons deal with the elicitation, analysis, and specification RE phases only. The RE Lesson Maps, elicited lessons, and the results from populating the maps provide novel scientific groundings for lessons learnt in RE as this topic has not yet been systematically studied in the field