Creative User-Centered Visualization Design for Energy Analysts and Modelers

We enhance a user-centered design process with techniques that deliberately promote creativity to identify opportunities for the visualization of data generated by a major energy supplier. Visualization prototypes developed in this way prove effective in a situation whereby data sets are largely unknown and requirements open – enabling successful exploration of possibilities for visualization in Smart Home data analysis. The process gives rise to novel designs and design metaphors including data sculpting. It suggests: that the deliberate use of creativity techniques with data stakeholders is likely to contribute to successful, novel and effective solutions; that being explicit about creativity may contribute to designers developing creative solutions; that using creativity techniques early in the design process may result in a creative approach persisting throughout the process. The work constitutes the first systematic visualization design for a data rich source that will be increasingly important to energy suppliers and consumers as Smart Meter technology is widely deployed. It is novel in explicitly employing creativity techniques at the requirements stage of visualization design and development, paving the way for further use and study of creativity methods in visualization design

DREAMER : a Design Rationale Environment for Argumentation, Modeling and Engineering Requirements

International audienceRequirements engineering for interactive systems remains a cumbersome task still under-supported by notations, development processes and tools. Indeed, in the field of HCI, the most common practice is to perform user testing to assess the compatibility between the designed system and its intended user. Other approaches such as scenario-based design promote a design process based on the analysis of the actual use of a technology in and activities. Some of them also support a critical element in the development of interactive systems: creativity]. However, these approaches do not provide any support for a) the definition of a set of requirements that have to be fulfilled by the system under design and b) as a consequence for assessing which of these requirements are actually embedded in the system and which ones have been discarded (traceability and coverage aspects). This paper proposes a tool-supported notation for addressing these problems of traceability and coverage of both requirements and design options during the development process of interactive systems. These elements are additionally integrated within a more global approach aiming at providing notations and tools for supporting a rationalized design of interactive systems following a model-based approach. Our approach combines and extends previous work on rational design and requirements engineering. The current contribution, DREAMER, makes possible to relate design options with both functional and non functional requirements. The approach is illustrated by real size case study from large civil aircraft cockpit applications

Can requirements be creative? Experiences with an enhanced air space management system

Requirements engineering is a creative process in which stakeholders work together to create ideas for new software systems that are eventually expressed as requirements. This paper reports a workshop that integrated creativity techniques with different types of use case and system context modeling to discover stakeholder requirements for EASM, a future air space management software system to enable the more effective, longer-term planning of UK and European airspace use. The workshop was successful in that it provided a range of outputs that were later assessed for their novelty and usefulness in the final specification of the EASM software. The paper describes the workshop structure, gives examples of outputs from it, and uses these results to answer 2 research questions about the utility of creativity techniques and workshops that had not been answered in previous research

REFLEXIÓN SOBRE LA ESPECIFICACIÓN DE REQUERIMIENTOS DENTRO DE UN CONTEXTO UNIVERSITARIO

Este artículo, aborda la especificación de requerimientos, a partir del marco teórico que sobre el mismo hacen los autores propuestos en los currículos de las materias de Análisis y Diseño de Sistemas e Ingeniería de Software, las cuales hacen parte del programa de Ingeniería de Sistemas de la Universidad Francisco de Paula Santander Ocaña. Los conceptos expuestos son verificados mediante la revisión de los proyectos de grado, que tienen como objetivo principal la construcción de un sistema o software. Desde luego, la academia tiene la responsabilidad de seguir buenas prácticas, éstas no se evidencian dentro del material estudiado, al encontrar que se siguen cometiendo los errores comunes que se advierten en la literatura y que en ella misma se indica cómo evitarlos; esto se demuestra al encontrar que los detalles de caso de uso son la práctica predominante de especificar requerimientos, pero como se encuentran escritos no obedecen a una notación estricta o completa a pesar que la forma de representarlos está escrita en lenguaje natural estructurado

Requirements Elicitation from BPMN Models

Tarkvarasüsteemi loomiseks on väga oluline mõista, millised on tegelikud vajadused ja nende rahuldamist takistavad piirangud. Nõuete tuvastamise käigus õpitakse tundma ümbritsevat keskkonda ja tehakse kindlaks kasutajate ning teiste osapoolte vajadused. Üheks peamiseks kohaks, kust nõudeid leida, on hetkel kasutatavad süsteemid (protsessid, organisatsioon, keskkond ja kasutatavad infosüsteemid). Kasutusel olevaid protsesse kujutatakse tihti graafiliselt mudelitena ja need mudelid kujutavad endast väga olulist informatsiooniallikat nõuete tuvastamisel. BPMN mudelid on saanud väga populaarseks ja neid kasutatakse tihti süsteemide kirjeldamiseks, kuid vaatamata sellele, et nad on väärtuslikud teadmiste allikad, kasutatakse neid nõuete tuvastamisel siiski harva. Üheks selliseks põhjuseks on asjaolu, et puuduvad konkreetsed ja põhjalikud juhised, mis aitavad süstemaatiliselt mudelist nõudeid tuvastada. Selles töös esitletakse meetodit funktsionaalsete nõuete tuvastamiseks BPMN mudelitest. Meetod läbib süsteemselt kõiki nõude komponente ja annab juhised, kuidas BPMN mudelist komponendi kohta informatsiooni leida ning annab lisaks kogumi küsimusi, mida valdkonna spetsialistidele esitada, et nõue oleks põhjalik, järjepidev, piiritletud ja nõutava detailsusega. Loodud meetodit rakendati ka juhtumiuuringu käigus ja tõestati, et uus meetod on rakendatav ning on struktureeritud lähenemine nõuete tuvastamiseks. Meetod tuvastas rohkem nõudeid kui meetod, mis oli algselt kasutusel juhtumi organisatsiooni poolt ja tuvastatud nõuded olid ka parema kvaliteediga. Meetodi rakendamine võttis märkimisväärselt vähem aega, tuvastamise protsess oli hästi kontrollitav, see võimaldas täpsemalt hinnata tuvastamisele kuluvat aega ja seeläbi on meetodit kasutades lihtsam protsessi planeerida ja ülesandeid delegeerida.When building a software system, it is crucial to understand the actual needs and the interfering constraints that apply in the surrounding environment. Elicitation of requirements is all about learning the environment and discovering the needs of users and other stakeholders. One of the primary sources for requirement elicitation is the system (processes, organization, environment and legacy systems) currently being used. The system is often captured in the form of graphical models, which are an important source of information for requirements elicitation. BPMN models are gaining popularity and are frequently used to model systems. Despite the fact that they are a valuable source of knowledge, they are rarely used as a source for eliciting requirements. One reason for this is the lack of concrete and comprehensive guidelines that would assist a systematic requirements elicitation from such models. This thesis presents a method for eliciting functional requirements from BPMN models. The method covers all components of a requirement and gives guidelines where in the BPMN model the information about the components can be found. It also provides a set of questions to be asked from domain experts to make sure that the requirement specification is complete, consistent, bounded and on the required level of granularity. The method was applied on a case study and it was proved that the method is applicable and provides a structured approach to eliciting requirements. The method elicited more requirements than the method previously used by the case organization, and the elicited requirements were also of better quality. The method took considerably less time to apply, it gave better control over the elicitation process, it was easier to evaluate the needed effort, and it enabled to better plan the process. The structured approach makes it easier to delegate work, and there are less situations where something might be overlooked

Adaptive software-based Feedback Acquisition: A Persona-based design

Users’ feedback is vital to improve software quality and it provides developers with a rich knowledge on how software meets users’ requirements in practice. Feedback informs how software should adapt, or be adapted, at runtime and what evolutionary actions to take in the next release. However, studies have noted that accommodating the different preferences of users on how feedback should be requested is a complex task and requires a careful engineering process. This calls for an adaptive feedback acquisition mechanisms to cater for such variability. In this paper, we tackle this problem by employing the concept of Persona to aid software engineers understand the various users’ behaviours and improve their ability to design feedback acquisition techniques more efficiently. We create a set of personas based on a mixture of qualitative and quantitative studies and propose PAFA, a Persona-based method for Adaptive Feedback Acquisition

Engineering an adaptive and socially- aware feedback acquisition.

Self-adaptive software systems are characterised by their ability to monitor changes in their dynamic environment and react to these changes when needed. Adaptation is driven by these changes in the internal state of the system and its external environment. Social Adaptation is a kind of adaptation which gives users’ feedback a primary role in shaping adaptation decisions. Social Adaptation infers and employs users’ collective judgement on the alternative behaviours of a system as the main driver in tailoring adaptation decision. Users’ collective judgement is determined through individual users’ feedback collected during the lifetime of the software. Social Adaptation still lacks systematic and efficient engineering mechanisms of the acquisition process of users’ feedback. The goal of this thesis is to devise an engineering method for a systematic and adaptive acquisition of users’ feedback. Given the various contextual information which could influence how feedback should be collected from users, this thesis looks at the acquisition process itself as an adaptive process. The goal of such adaptation is to optimize the quality of obtained feedback without affecting users’ experience. In order to achieve the goal of this thesis, several empirical studies with software engineering experts and end-users have been conducted. This helped gaining insights into how the role of users’ feedback is perceived by software experts and how users behave and react to feedback acquisition. The outcomes of the empirical studies are then exploited to achieve the aim of thesis. The findings informed by these studies suggest that users’ behaviours to feedback acquisition highly varies and an adaptive feedback acquisition is highly needed to cater for differences in behaviours, improve users’ satisfaction, feedback quality and software success. To tackle this problem, the concept of Persona is employed to aid software engineers understand the various users’ behaviours and improve their ability to design feedback acquisition techniques more efficiently. The personas are developed based on a mixture of the qualitative and quantitative studies conducted throughout this thesis. In addition, this thesis proposes PAFA, a Persona-based method for a systematic design of an Adaptive Feedback Acquisition and reports on its evaluation. Finally, this thesis is also meant to contribute to the knowledge of software engineering community on developing systematic ways for feedback engineering which are hoped to lead to a better quality feedback and maintained users experience

Designing for experience - a requirements framework for enrolment based and public facing e-government services

User-centricity is a pre-requisite for a truly transformational e-government strategy. This goes beyond visual design and appeal, and ties down to a rudimentary measure of how far people are willing to go to enrol for and use e-government services. Enrolment can have a serious impact on the success of online government services. Different services require different levels of identity assurance, and different enrolment processes are put in place to deliver them. But from the citizen's perspective these processes often require a disproportionate amount of effort, producing hurdles that affect user acceptance and ultimately service adoption. When enrolling to high-effort services is not mandatory, take-up is low; when it is compulsory, it causes resentment, and neither is desirable. Despite existing work on the impact of security and identity processes on end users there has been little work on how these contributions could be operationalised and adopted by practitioners and policy makers as part of the requirements development process. Research in HCI provides techniques to help practitioners design systems that are within general human capabilities, however such techniques are too generic to approximate use-time behaviour across user groups and within different contexts of use. This thesis proposes Calibrated Personas, a user modelling technique that accumulates knowledge on user behaviour to model and fine-tune tolerance levels for workload and its impact on e-government service adoption (1) across user groups, (2) e-service types and (3) contexts of use. A user group calibration protocol was devised to facilitate data collection and model generation for user behaviour in enrolment-specific use cases. These models are in turn used to approximate user reactions towards design alternatives, reducing the gap between design-time knowledge (upon which decisions are made) and use-time knowledge. To facilitate this activity this work presents Sentire ('to listen'), a requirements and design framework that combines industry-strength practices with user feedback simulations (referred to as UX-analytics). These simulations in turn inform the requirements development process with actionable feedback as part of an iterative design process. This thesis considers tool support for Sentire as central to the investigation in order to facilitate adoption by practitioners and to encourage knowledge sharing and re-use within the e-government domain. For this reason, an online collaborative computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool was developed and evaluated throughout the various real-world interventions carried out for this thesis. Sentire was applied to two new national e-services and also in the evaluation of an existing one. User-studies and expert evaluation were instrumental to the evolution and validation of the main contributions and deliverables arising from this thesis