Abstract:
Competencies such as eliciting information, sensitivity to people, negotiation and conflict management are vital for effective requirements analysis, and hence crucially important for developing successful systems in industry. However, with a few notable exceptions, relatively little training or advice on requirements elicitation exists. In this tutorial we will interweave expert advice on the elicitation of requirements analysis and soft skills with knowledge from cognitive psychology on values, motivations and emotions to provide guidance on the elicitation and exploration of “soft requirements”, with recommendations for managing the requirements process, project management and systems architecture implications.
Lectures will be interleaved with a series of practical sessions based around a case study: participants will analyse interviews with users, and carry out a requirements analysis exercise using the techniques explained in the tutorial, to explore how the software system requirement might be improved from a socio-technical perspective.
Presenters:
Alistair Sutcliffe is Professor of Systems Engineering in the Manchester Business School, University of Manchester. He has been principal investigator on numerous EPSRC and European Union projects. Originally a psychologist, he researches in Human Computer Interaction and Software Engineering with particular interests in interaction theory, requirements engineering methodology, user experience, social computing, and design of complex socio-technical systems. He is on the editorial board of ACM TOCHI, REJ and JASE. Alistair Sutcliffe gave plenary presentations at the RE’09 and CAiSE’06 conferences and has over 250 publications including five books and several edited volumes of papers.
Sarah Thew has worked as a requirements analyst and usability specialist in the pharmaceutical and scientific software industries for 10 years and has an MSc in Computation from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. She is currently working on a project to develop software to support academic and government public health researchers. Her research interests include the socio-technical aspects of requirements engineering, usability of scientific software and bioinformatics.