Effectiveness of Elicitation Techniques in Distributed Requirements Engineering

Software development teams are often geographically distributed from their customers and end users. This creates significant communication and coordination challenges that impact the effectiveness of requirements engineering. Travel costs, and the local availability of quality technical staff increase the demand for effective distributed software development teams. This research reports an empirical study of how groupware can be used to aid distributed requirements engineering for a software development project. Six groups of seven to nine members were formed and divided into separate remote groups of customers and engineers. The engineers conducted a requirements analysis and produced a software requirements specification (SRS) document through distributed interaction with the remote customers. We present results and conclusions from the research including: an analysis of factors that effected the quality of the Software Requirements Specification document written at the conclusion of the requirements process and the effectiveness of requirements elicitation techniques which were used in a distributed setting for requirements gathering

A requirements engineering framework for integrated systems development for the construction industry

Computer Integrated Construction (CIC) systems are computer environments through which collaborative working can be undertaken. Although many CIC systems have been developed to demonstrate the communication and collaboration within the construction projects, the uptake of CICs by the industry is still inadequate. This is mainly due to the fact that research methodologies of the CIC development projects are incomplete to bridge the technology transfer gap. Therefore, defining comprehensive methodologies for the development of these systems and their effective implementation on real construction projects is vital. Requirements Engineering (RE) can contribute to the effective uptake of these systems because it drives the systems development for the targeted audience. This paper proposes a requirements engineering approach for industry driven CIC systems development. While some CIC systems are investigated to build a broad and deep contextual knowledge in the area, the EU funded research project, DIVERCITY (Distributed Virtual Workspace for Enhancing Communication within the Construction Industry), is analysed as the main case study project because its requirements engineering approach has the potential to determine a framework for the adaptation of requirements engineering in order to contribute towards the uptake of CIC systems

Industry-driven innovative system development for the construction industry: The DIVERCITY project

Collaborative working has become possible using the innovative integrated systems in construction as many activities are performed globally with stakeholders situated in various locations. The Integrated VR based information systems can bind the fragmentation and provide communication and collaboration between the distributed stakeholders n various locations. The development of these technologies is vital for the uptake of these systems by the construction industry. This paper starts by emphasising the importance of construction IT research and reviews some future research directions in this area. In particular, the paper explores how virtual prototyping can improve the productivity and effectiveness of construction projects, and presents DIVERCITY, which is th as a case study of the research in virtual prototyping. Besides, the paper explores the requirements engineering of the DIVERCITY project. DIVERCITY has large and evolving requirements, which considered the perspectives of multiple stakeholders, such as clients, architects and contractors. However, practitioners are often unsure of the detail of how virtual environments would support the construction process, and how to overcome some barriers to the introduction of new technologies. This complicates the requirements engineering process

Expert Elicitation for Reliable System Design

This paper reviews the role of expert judgement to support reliability assessments within the systems engineering design process. Generic design processes are described to give the context and a discussion is given about the nature of the reliability assessments required in the different systems engineering phases. It is argued that, as far as meeting reliability requirements is concerned, the whole design process is more akin to a statistical control process than to a straightforward statistical problem of assessing an unknown distribution. This leads to features of the expert judgement problem in the design context which are substantially different from those seen, for example, in risk assessment. In particular, the role of experts in problem structuring and in developing failure mitigation options is much more prominent, and there is a need to take into account the reliability potential for future mitigation measures downstream in the system life cycle. An overview is given of the stakeholders typically involved in large scale systems engineering design projects, and this is used to argue the need for methods that expose potential judgemental biases in order to generate analyses that can be said to provide rational consensus about uncertainties. Finally, a number of key points are developed with the aim of moving toward a framework that provides a holistic method for tracking reliability assessment through the design process.Comment: This paper commented in: [arXiv:0708.0285], [arXiv:0708.0287], [arXiv:0708.0288]. Rejoinder in [arXiv:0708.0293]. Published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/088342306000000510 in the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

The Cognitive Atlas: Employing Interaction Design Processes to Facilitate Collaborative Ontology Creation

The Cognitive Atlas is a collaborative knowledge-building project that aims to develop an ontology that characterizes the current conceptual framework among researchers in cognitive science and neuroscience. The project objectives from the beginning focused on usability, simplicity, and utility for end users. Support for Semantic Web technologies was also a priority in order to support interoperability with other neuroscience projects and knowledge bases. Current off-the-shelf semantic web or semantic wiki technologies, however, do not often lend themselves to simple user interaction designs for non-technical researchers and practitioners; the abstract nature and complexity of these systems acts as point of friction for user interaction, inhibiting usability and utility. Instead, we take an alternate interaction design approach driven by user centered design processes rather than a base set of semantic technologies. This paper reviews the initial two rounds of design and development of the Cognitive Atlas system, including interactive design decisions and their implementation as guided by current industry practices for the development of complex interactive systems

Business and Information System Alignment Theories Built on eGovernment Service Practice: An Holistic Literature Review

© 2019 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This chapter examines previous studies of alignment between business and information systems holistically in relation to the development of working associations among professionals from information system and business backgrounds in business organization and eGovernment sectors while investigating alignment research that permits the development and growth of information system, which is appropriate, within budget and on-time development. The process of alignment plays a key role in the construction of dependent associations among individuals from two different groups, and the progress of alignment could be enhanced by emerging an information system according to the investors’ prospects. The chapter presents system theory to gather and analyze the data across the designated platforms. The outcomes classify that alignment among business and information system departments remains a priority and is of worry in different ways in diverse areas, which provides prospects for the forthcoming discussion and research.Final Published versio