Multi-Modal Emotion Recognition for Enhanced Requirements Engineering: A Novel Approach

Requirements engineering (RE) plays a crucial role in developing software systems by bridging the gap between stakeholders' needs and system specifications. However, effective communication and elicitation of stakeholder requirements can be challenging, as traditional RE methods often overlook emotional cues. This paper introduces a multi-modal emotion recognition platform (MEmoRE) to enhance the requirements engineering process by capturing and analyzing the emotional cues of stakeholders in real-time. MEmoRE leverages state-of-the-art emotion recognition techniques, integrating facial expression, vocal intonation, and textual sentiment analysis to comprehensively understand stakeholder emotions. This multi-modal approach ensures the accurate and timely detection of emotional cues, enabling requirements engineers to tailor their elicitation strategies and improve overall communication with stakeholders. We further intend to employ our platform for later RE stages, such as requirements reviews and usability testing. By integrating multi-modal emotion recognition into requirements engineering, we aim to pave the way for more empathetic, effective, and successful software development processes. We performed a preliminary evaluation of our platform. This paper reports on the platform design, preliminary evaluation, and future development plan as an ongoing project

Using the affect grid to measure emotions in software requirements engineering

Computer systems are designed and used by humans. And human being is characterized, among other things, by emotions. Giving this fact, the process of designing and developing computer systems is, like any other facet in our lives, driven by emotions. Requirements engineering is one of the main phases in software development. In Requirements engineering, several tasks include acceptance and negotiation activities in which the emotional factor represents a key role. This paper presents a study based on the application of affect grid by Russell in requirements engineering main stakeholders: developers and users. Results show that high arousal and low pleasure levels in the process are predictors of conflictive requirements.Publicad

Implementing Abbreviated Personas into Engineering Education

Personas are fictional archetypal consumers that aid designers and engineers in more effectively creating products with a human interface. As more products shift from strict utilitarian function to meeting additional physical and psychological needs, designers and engineers must implement emotional design in more domains. Learning to employ personas to explore elements of emotional design is beneficial in an academic course and capstone project as these personas allow students to consider engineering requirements from the perspective of Donald Norman’s three aspects of emotional design: visceral, behavioral, and reflective. In this paper, we present an approach to evaluate the efficacy of using abbreviated personas, which are truncated personas containing typical user biographic information, goals, habits, or experiences. In our first experiment at Stanford University the students focused on the use of and outcome from the abbreviated personas and not the persona generation itself. The lessons learned from this experiment were then applied in a capstone course at the US Military Academy to better understand the full extent of implementation into engineering education. The automotive design capstone originated in a mechanical engineering course focused on engineering engagement through story-telling and included three distinct presentation methods for abbreviated personas at a public exhibition. Over 250 participants interacted with the abbreviated personas and manipulated an analog display based on their understanding of each persona. From these participants, 82 provided written feedback and completed exit surveys on the presentation methods for the abbreviated personas. The data indicate that despite some differences between the presentation methods, all the abbreviated personas contained enough information for making design decisions based on user emotion and requirements. The second application of abbreviated personas builds on this notion and unifies the presentation method to focus on the inputs of the abbreviated personas throughout the design/build process in the capstone. Team member interviews and surveys will capture the data from this iteration

Experience of Visual Perception in the Design Education

Relevance of the paper is due to theoretical and practical necessity to study the peculiarities of design education. Modern designer shall, theoretically and methodologically, master the system of design engineering based on the laws affecting the form of product, methods of styling design and design quality analysis, basics of materials science and industrial design engineering. Design of industrial products shall draw upon historical, cultural, logistical, aesthetic and artistic foundations. The paper applies methods of cultural and historical analysis, comparative methods, methods of analysis and simulation of semiotic systems. Authors, emphasizing training process integrity for design specialists, pay attention to the fact that in the modern urban world requirements to visual aesthetics are particularly important, ensuring videoecology of objects and environment, creating maximum emotional comfort. Ability to create emotional environment is due to form quality, generating peculiarities of psychological reactions as emotions. The study of form perception revealed the mechanism of creating emotional response associated with semantic capacity of design object and special features of its visual organization. Perception model of visual images in design was suggested, including recognition, comparison and dialogue processes. The findings are scientifically-based recommendations, tailored to visual perception and aimed at creating emotional comfort in design

Experience of Visual Perception in the Design Education

Relevance of the paper is due to theoretical and practical necessity to study the peculiarities of design education. Modern designer shall, theoretically and methodologically, master the system of design engineering based on the laws affecting the form of product, methods of styling design and design quality analysis, basics of materials science and industrial design engineering. Design of industrial products shall draw upon historical, cultural, logistical, aesthetic and artistic foundations. The paper applies methods of cultural and historical analysis, comparative methods, methods of analysis and simulation of semiotic systems. Authors, emphasizing training process integrity for design specialists, pay attention to the fact that in the modern urban world requirements to visual aesthetics are particularly important, ensuring videoecology of objects and environment, creating maximum emotional comfort. Ability to create emotional environment is due to form quality, generating peculiarities of psychological reactions as emotions. The study of form perception revealed the mechanism of creating emotional response associated with semantic capacity of design object and special features of its visual organization. Perception model of visual images in design was suggested, including recognition, comparison and dialogue processes. The findings are scientifically-based recommendations, tailored to visual perception and aimed at creating emotional comfort in design

Automotive styling: Supporting engineering-styling convergence through surface-centric knowledge based engineering

The emotional impression a car imprints on a potential buyer is as equally important for its commercial success as fulfilling functional requirements. Hence, to create a positive emotional impression of a vehicle, great effort is put into a car's styling process. One of the key aspects during the early stages of the automotive design process is the convergence of styling and engineering design. While requirements stemming from engineering design are usually characterised by quantitative values, styling requirements are rather qualitative in nature. Converging these two requirement types is laborious. The present publication focuses on supporting this process through Knowledge Based Engineering. This is achieved by introducing a method which enables the designer to intuitively regard functional requirements during the styling phase. Moreover, the method improves the process of technical requirement checks regarding the shape and orientation of styling surfaces which exceed conventional package verifications

The dimensions of software engineering success

Software engineering research and practice are hampered by the lack of a well-understood, top-level dependent variable. Recent initiatives on General Theory of Software Engineering suggest a multifaceted variable – Software Engineering Success. However, its exact dimensions are unknown. This paper investigates the dimensions (not causes) of software engineering success. An interdisciplinary sample of 191 design professionals (68 in the software industry) were interviewed concerning their perceptions of success. Non-software designers (e.g. architects) were included to increase the breadth of ideas and facilitate comparative analysis. Transcripts were subjected to supervised, semi-automated semantic content analysis, including a software developer vs. other professionals comparison. Findings suggest that participants view their work as time-constrained projects with explicit clients and other stakeholders. Success depends on stakeholder impacts – financial, social, physical and emotional – and is understood through feedback. Concern with meeting explicit requirements is peculiar to software engineering and design is not equated with aesthetics in many other fields. Software engineering success is a complex multifaceted variable, which cannot sufficiently be explained by traditional dimensions including user satisfaction, profitability or meeting requirements, budgets and schedules. A proto-theory of success is proposed, which models success as the net impact on a particular stakeholder at a particular time. Stakeholder impacts are driven by project efficiency, artifact quality and market performance. Success is not additive, e.g., ‘low’ success for clients does not average with ‘high’ success for developers to make ‘moderate’ success overall; rather, a project may be simultaneously successful and unsuccessful from different perspectives