DESIGN AS INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE:

COUPLING HUMAN-CENTERED DESIGN WITH REQUIREMENT

ENGINEERING METHODS

Chiara Leonardi, Luca Sabatucci, Angelo Susi, and Massimo Zancanaro

INTERACT 2011, September 9th, Lisboa

Speaker: Luca Sabatucci, Software Engineering Unit, FBK

ACube

• Critical Context

• Acceptability

• Privacy and Value

• Low Intrusiveness

2

Slide 3

Human-Centered Design

Strengths

• Ethnographic Study• Engagement of users• Concrete representation

of the domain• Stories prioritize

requirements

Limits

• Does not support traceability

• Does not support abstraction

• Coverage problem

The Tropos MethodologyAn Overview

• Agent-oriented design process, • Based on goal-oriented language and notation.• The focus is on capturing intentional and strategic

dependencies among actors of a domain.• Five phases: from early/later requirements to

architecture, implementation and deployment.

Giunchiglia et al. 2003. The Tropos Software Development Methodology: Processes, Models and Diagrams. In Agent-Oriented Software Engineering III, Springer

Slide 5

Tropos

Strengths

• Strategic view of the domain

• Analysis of motivations and dependencies

• Check of quality and coverage

• Support traceability

Lacks and Limits

• Prioritization of requirements

• Needs translation to involve users

• Model mainly invariant elements of the domain

• Can’t model physical context

Tropos and UCD: a Promising Synergy

• Purpose:• synergy without reducing advantages

• Enablers:• Ground on information about people• Similar “High Level” objectives (requirements)• Similar Language (goal/need, actor/persona)• Similar methodological approach (data exploration, filtering)

Slide 7

Working Together

Integration

• bridge the gap between different research traditions

• to work in a situation of methodological pluralism

• overhead for practitioners

Assimilation

• transform a specific approach to make it fit into another one

• to work in a situation of methodological purity

• the risk is to loose the strength of one of the approaches

• more complex for method designer

The Common Meta-Model: a lesson learned

TROPOS META-MODEL

UCD META-MODEL ?

persona

need

scenario

empathy

wish

= difficulty in providing a precise semantics

?

?

? = uncertainty to bridge concepts

= difficulty in identifying inter-concepts relationships

Susi et al. 2005. The Tropos Metamodel and its Use. INFORMATICA

9

Ambiguity:a different perspective

The Integrated Process• Iterative process• Design threads in parallel

• shared design vision• common problem space• no priority

• Inform without constraining• Frequent, small evaluations

Slide 11

The aim is to find under what conditions our experience can be generalized

• Strengths/limits analysis

• Making the divides explicit

• Mutual learning

RE

CIP

E

Strengths/limits analysis• It relies on the identification of strengths and limits

• This allows to define integration points to create a beneficial dialogue

• It allows to preserve their strengths.

Slide 12

Making the divides explicit

Identifying barriers that may hinder the dialogue between the two methods.

• Epistemological divides

• Linguistic and conceptual divides

Slide 13

Mutual learning

Mutual learning represent the crucial aspect to mediate between the different epistemologies and languages

• Definition of a shared dictionary of terms (natural language)

• Collaborative negotiation of the definition of terms in the dictionary which leads to discover hidden relationships between terms

• Iteration with refinement until the agreement

Slide 14

Operative Example

• A criticality is a situation in the organization for which the system is being designed.

• A criticality is represented as a view on the organization model that focuses on highlighting actors, goals and tasks when a critical situation occurs.

• The description is enriched with information about the context in which the problem may occur and the impact on the standard stakeholder activities.

CRITICALITIESTROPOS EARLY REQUIREMENTS

PERSONAS/SCENARIOS

CONTEXT NARRATIVE DESCRIPTION

Slide 16

Conclusion

Strengths/Limits

Identify Barriers

Mutual Learning