Requirements Capture

1
Requirements Capture

• learning from users with qualitative observations
  in the field

2
Agenda

• Questions
• The larger context
• Stakeholders
• Different techniques
• Socio-technical modeling, soft systems
  methodolody, participatory design, ethnography,
  contextual inquiry

3
The Larger Context

• The limited perspective of TA
• Additional socio-technical context
• Interrelationship of human and machine elements
• Richness, reality of work places
• Counters technological determinism
• Different perspective of stakeholders

4
Stakeholders

• Primary targeted end users
• Secondary receive output or provide input to
  system
• Tertiary others directly receiving benefits
  from system success or failure
• Facilitating design, development, maintenance

5
Example stakeholder analysis
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Structured Techniques

• CUSTOM
• OSTA
• Using interviews, observations, focus groups and
  document analysis

7
Soft Systems Methodology

• Similar technique to previous, but with no
  assumption of a technology solution
• Rich picture is artifact (p. 464)

8
Participatory Design

• Scandinavian tradition
• End user as part of design team
• Highly iterative
• Work oriented (versus system)

9
Ethnography

• Studying actual work practice in context
• an action can only be understood in the place,
  in the social situation, and at the time at which
  it occurred.
• Sociology and anthropology tradition

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Underlying theories

• Distributed cognition
• Situated action
• We will revisit these later

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Ethnography Advice

• Unbiased observation
• Reporting versus advising
• Not directly about design
• Contrast with participatory design
• In vs Out of work place

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Contextual Inquiry

• Defining Customer-Center Systems
• Hugh Beyer and Karen Holtzblatt
• Ethnography light design
• Making relevant to design objectives

13
CI Process

• Inquiry
• Work modeling
• Consolidation
• Work redesign
• User environment design
• Mock up and test

14
Starting Out

• What do you know?
• Where not to start
• Marketing data
• Detailed surveys
• Jumping into design
• Asking the customer
• Inquiry Observation Interview

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Observation

• You just landed on planet X
• People use knowledge in the world
• Lots of non-verbal details
• Listen to the language
• Videotaping

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Interviews

• 2-3 hour interview at workplace
• recorded for analysis
• Understand underlying structure / goals / values
  
• Make tacit knowledge explicit
• Apprentice model

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Interviews

• Keeping the interview open
• Cheat sheets
• Create interpretations together
• What should I have asked?

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Other techniques

• Exercises
• Sorting, ordering
• Focus groups
• Reaction to prototypes
• Surveys
• Detailed data, evaluation

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Triangulation

• Multiple viewpoints
• Different types of data
• Discover bias
• Better data
• Shared understanding

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Work Models

• Sequence
• Activity steps triggers
• Physical
• Map work environment and impact
• Flow
• Lines of coordination and communication
• Cultural
• Influences of work culture and policy
• Artifact
• Structure and use of objects w/in work process