Experience requirements

Video game development is a high-risk effort with low probability of success. The interactive nature of the resulting artifact increases production complexity, often doing so in ways that are unexpected. New methodologies are needed to address issues in this domain. Video game development has two major phases: preproduction and production. During preproduction, the game designer and other members of the creative team create and capture a vision of the intended player experience in the game design document. The game design document tells the story and describes the game - it does not usually explicitly elaborate all of the details of the intended player experience, particularly with respect to how the player is intended to feel as the game progresses. Details of the intended experience tend to be communicated verbally, on an as-needed basis during iterations of the production effort. During production, the software and media development teams attempt to realize the preproduction vision in a game artifact. However, the game design document is not traditionally intended to capture production-ready requirements, particularly for software development. As a result, there is a communications chasm between preproduction and production efforts that can lead to production issues such as excessive reliance on direct communication with the game designer, difficulty scoping project elements, and difficulty in determining reasonably accurate effort estimates. We posit that defining and capturing the intended player experience in a manner that is influenced and informed by established requirements engineering principles and techniques will help cross the communications chasm between preproduction and production. The proposed experience requirements methodology is a novel contribution composed of: a model for the elements that compose experience requirements, a framework that provides guidance for expressing experience requirements, and an exemplary process for the elicitation, capture, and negotiation of experience requirements. Experience requirements capture the designer' s intent for the user experience; they represent user experience goals for the artifact and constraints upon the implementation and are not expected to be formal in the mathematical sense. Experience requirements are evolutionary in intent - they incrementally enhance and extend existing practices in a relatively lightweight manner using language and representations that are intended to be mutually acceptable to preproduction and to production

Augmenting Emotional Requirements with Emotion Markers and Emotion Prototypes

Abstract A production-phase weakness in emotional requirements was identified and resolved during a follow-up study. The definition of emotional requirements was extended to include emotion prototypes and emotion markers. Improved practices for identifying media assets for emotional requirements were developed, enhancing their utility to the production process

Everything is INTERRELATED:Teaching Software Engineering for Sustainability

Sustainability has become an important concern across many disciplines,and software systems play an increasingly central role in addressing it. However, teaching students from software engineering and related disciplines to effectively act in this space requires interdisciplinary courses that combines the concep to of sustainability with software engineering practice and principles. Yet, presently little guidance exist on which subjects and materials to cover in such courses and how, combined with a lack of reusable learning objects. This paper describes a summer school course on Software Engineering for Sustainability (SE4S). We provide a blueprint for this course, in the hope that it can help the community develop a shared approach and methods to teaching SE4S. Practical lessons learned from delivery of this course are also reported here, and could help iterate over the course materials, structure, and guidance for future improvements. The course blueprint, availability of used materials and report of the study results make this course viable for replication and further improvement

Massively distributed authorship of academic papers

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Requirements Scoping Visualization for Project Management

Determining requirements process efficiency, and measuring the corresponding monetary impacts, is a challenging but necessary aspect of project management. In this paper, we perform an independent analysis of scoping decisions from a large industrial project with the goal of providing visualizations that facilitate investigations of process efficiency, agility, and the effects of scoping decisions. The visualizations proposed in this paper can be used to analyze scoping dynamics and support process management decisions on a quantitative rather than a qualitative basis

More than requirements: Applying requirements engineering techniques to the challenge of setting corporate intellectual policy, an experience report

Creation and adoption of corporate policies requires significant commitment of scarce senior management resources. In the absence of processes and tools, convergence upon final policy and may not be achieved in a timely manner. Significant similarities between policy and requirements documents suggest that requirements engineering techniques could be used to generate policy. However, neither evidence of feasibility of this approach nor theoretical investigation is present in the research literature. This paper reports upon our experience from an exploratory study where well-established requirements engineering methodologies were applied to generate corporate intellectual property policy. Interview, brainstorming and survey techniques were used to successfully apply structure and process to the task, generating a new corporate intellectual property policy that met or exceeded all stakeholder goals. The materials gathered during stakeholder interactions and analysis not only provided functional guidance for the policy itself, but also non-functional guidance with respect to the diversity of stakeholder opinions and the strength with which opinions were held. This knowledge greatly facilitated the creation of draft policy: this insider knowledge increased our expectation of stakeholder acceptance and also facilitated subsequent negotiation efforts. The feasibility of applying RE techniques to crafting corporate policy has been demonstrated and the results show sufficient promise that further investigation is warranted

Public policy challenges : An RE perspective

In this perspective paper, we investigate the parallels between public policy and IT projects from the perspective of traditional RE practice. Using the mainstream media as an information source (as would an average citizen), over a period of approximately one year we captured documents that presented analyses of public policy issues. The documents were categorized into eight topic areas, then analyzed to identify patterns that RE practitioners would recognize. We found evidence of policy failures that parallel project failures traceable to requirements engineering problems. Our analysis revealed evidence of bias across all stakeholder groups, similar to the rise of the “beliefs over facts” phenomenon often associated with “fake news”. We also found substantial evidence of unintended consequences due to inadequate problem scoping, terminology definition, domain knowledge, and stakeholder identification and engagement. Further, ideological motivations were found to affect constraint definitions resulting in solution spaces that may approach locally optimal but may not be globally optimal. Public policy addresses societal issues; our analysis supports our conclusion that RE techniques could be utilized to support policy creation and implementation. © 2018 SPIE. All rights reserved

On the facets of stakeholder inertia: A literature review

Intense competition in rapidly changing markets puts intense pressure on product definition and the associated requirements engineering processes. An extensive literature review has identified that brand inertia, customer inertia, inappropriate market entry strategies and an inability to satisfy customer needs or expectations are the principle contributors to customer product rejection. While RE practice has developed a number of methodologies for addressing aspects of the contributing factors to these failures, very little prior work has focused on the inertia aspects of the problem. In this work we present the results of our literature review and build upon this review to develop an initial framework for incorporating stakeholder inertia into RE practice and management processes. We conclude with a detailed agenda for further research into aspects of the stakeholder inertia problem

Guiding requirements scoping using ROI: towards agility, openness and waste reduction

We present a model for supporting scoping decisions that is based on an analysis of the ROI for a given feature. Employing a ROI threshold value for making scoping decisions, the utility of the model was investigated using data from a single large project and identified a group of outlying features responsible for a disproportionate wasted investment. These initial results are promising and indicate that further investigation and validation efforts are warranted