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

A situational approach and intelligent tool for collaborative requirements elicitation

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Information Technology.Requirements elicitation is a fundamental part of the software development process, and widely regarded as one of its more challenging activities. Many of the current techniques, approaches, and tools are either unknown or too complex for novices, resulting in a significant gap between requirements elicitation theory and practice. Just as important, is the current gap between expert and novice analysts, which can be attributed to the extensive skill set and range of experiences that is often required to successfully conduct this difficult yet vital activity. Consequently, in this research we investigated both the state of the art and the state of practice, in order to develop and evaluate an approach and a tool to support novice analysts elicit requirements for software systems in a workshop environment. The first stage of the research was a literature review, which involved a thorough review and critical analysis of existing theory on and around the area of requirements elicitation. This was followed by a survey of practice, which consisted of in-depth interviews with experts, and an online questionnaire for novices, used to elicit approach guidelines and tool features. The OUTSET approach was then designed, and the supporting tool MUSTER constructed. The final stage of the research involved the evaluation of the approach and tool through a case study, case study experiment, and formal experiment. The empirical evaluations conducted showed that using the MUSTER tool improved the overall effectiveness of the requirements elicitation process, while the underlying OUTSET approach improved the overall efficiency. It was also shown that the combination of the approach and tool provided a collective system that was both useful and useable. In the experiment conducted, the MUSTER tool received more than three times the score of the manual tool for effectiveness, and more than double for usability. In addition, the combination of research methods used, and the successful application of Situational Method Engineering (SME) and Group Support System (GSS) principles for the approach and tool respectively, was both novel and unique from any other previous work on requirements elicitation

Supporting collaboration within the eScience community

Collaboration is a core activity at the heart of large-scale co- operative scientific experimentation. In order to support the emergence of Grid-based scientific collaboration, new models of e-Science working methods are needed. Scientific collaboration involves production and manipulation of various artefacts. Based on work done in the software engineering field, this paper proposes models and tools which will support the representation and production of such artefacts. It is necessary to provide facilities to classify, organise, acquire, process, share, and reuse artefacts generated during collaborative working. The concept of a "design space" will be used to organise scientific design and the composition of experiments, and methods such as self-organising maps will be used to support the reuse of existing artefacts. It is proposed that this work can be carried out and evaluated in the UK e-Science community, using an "industry as laboratory" approach to the research, building on the knowledge, expertise, and experience of those directly involved in e-Science

Requirements engineering within a large-scale security-oriented research project : lessons learned

Requirements engineering has been recognized as a fundamental phase of the software engineering process. Nevertheless, the elicitation and analysis of requirements are often left aside in favor of architecture-driven software development. This tendency, however, can lead to issues that may affect the success of a project. This paper presents our experience gained in the elicitation and analysis of requirements in a large-scale security-oriented European research project, which was originally conceived as an architecture-driven project. In particular, we illustrate the challenges that can be faced in large-scale research projects and consider the applicability of existing best practices and off-the-shelf methodologies with respect to the needs of such projects. We then discuss how those practices and methods can be integrated into the requirements engineering process and possibly improved to address the identified challenges. Finally, we summarize the lessons learned from our experience and the benefits that a proper requirements analysis can bring to a project

Requirements engineering within a large-scale security-oriented research project : lessons learned

Requirements engineering has been recognized as a fundamental phase of the software engineering process. Nevertheless, the elicitation and analysis of requirements are often left aside in favor of architecture-driven software development. This tendency, however, can lead to issues that may affect the success of a project. This paper presents our experience gained in the elicitation and analysis of requirements in a large-scale security-oriented European research project, which was originally conceived as an architecture-driven project. In particular, we illustrate the challenges that can be faced in large-scale research projects and consider the applicability of existing best practices and off-the-shelf methodologies with respect to the needs of such projects. We then discuss how those practices and methods can be integrated into the requirements engineering process and possibly improved to address the identified challenges. Finally, we summarize the lessons learned from our experience and the benefits that a proper requirements analysis can bring to a project

Functional Requirements Identification Using Item-to-Item Collaborative Filtering

One of the most difficult tasks in the development of software is the identification of the functional requirements. A well-defined functional requirement will eventually map the success of a software project. A support tool that can recommend candidate functional requirements for a software project being developed will help software engineers to deliver the right software to the clients.The purpose of this study is to determine whether a collection of previously developed software applications can serve as basis for the development of a model to identify functional requirements of a project to be developed. Completed software project documentations of Master in Information Technology graduates from Higher Education Institutions in northern Luzon were collected and categorized, and projects on Faculty Evaluation Systems were analyzed in order to extract the vectors of functional requirements for the target software domain. Item-to-item collaborative filtering is then applied to these vectors to form the recommender model. Finally, the model was validated using the leave-one-out cross-validation technique. The resulting high accuracy rate indicates that the model built using the item-to-item collaborative filter may be used to build a tool that can automatically recommend important related functional requirements given one or more requirements identified by any of the project stakeholders

Requirements Engineering as Creative Problem Solving: A Research Agenda for Idea Finding

This vision paper frames requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. Its purpose is to enable requirements researchers and practitioners to recruit relevant theories, models, techniques and tools from creative problem solving to understand and support requirements processes more effectively. It uses 4 drivers to motivate the case for requirements engineering as a creative problem solving process. It then maps established requirements activities onto one of the longest-established creative problem solving processes, and uses these mappings to locate opportunities for the application of creative problem solving in requirements engineering. The second half of the paper describes selected creativity theories, techniques, software tools and training that can be adopted to improve requirements engineering research and practice. The focus is on support for problem and idea finding - two creative problem solving processes that our investigation revealed are poorly supported in requirements engineering. The paper ends with a research agenda to incorporate creative processes, techniques, training and tools in requirements projects

Collaborating with the Crowd for Software Requirements Engineering: A Literature Review

Requirements engineering (RE) represents a decisive success factor in software development. The novel approach of crowd-based RE seeks to overcome shortcomings of traditional RE practices such as the resource intensiveness and selection bias of stakeholder workshops or interviews. Two streams of research on crowd-based RE can be observed in literature: data-driven approaches that extract requirements from user feedback or analytics data and collaborative approaches in which requirements are collectively developed by a crowd of software users. As yet, research surveying the state of crowd-based RE does not put particular emphasis on collaborative approaches, despite collaborative crowdsourcing being particularly suited for joint ideation and complex problem-solving tasks. Addressing this gap, we conduct a structured literature review to identify the RE activities supported by collaborative crowd-based approaches. Our research provides a systematic overview of the domain of collaborative crowd-based RE and guides researchers and practitioners in increasing user involvement in RE