Page 97 - DCAP405_SOFTWARE_ENGINEERING

Software Engineering

Notes Good analysts must be sensitive to these factors, but there is currently no systematic way
to tackle their analysis.

Example:
1. Consider a system, which allows senior management to access information without
going through middle managers.
2. Managerial status. Senior managers may feel that they are too important to use a
keyboard. This may limit the type of system interface used.

3. Managerial responsibilities. Managers may have no uninterrupted time when they
can learn to use the system
4. Organizational resistance. Middle managers who will be made redundant may
deliberately provide misleading or incomplete information so that the system will
fail.
Ethnography

Social scientists spends considerable time observing and analyzing how people actually
work.
People do not have to explain or articulate what they do.

Social and organizational factors of importance may be observed.
Ethnographic studies have shown that work is usually richer and more complex than
suggested by simple system models.

Focused Ethnography

Developed during a project studying the air traffic control process.

Combines ethnography with prototyping.
Prototype development raises issues, which focus the ethnographic analysis.
Problem with ethnography alone: it studies existing practices, which may not be relevant
when a new system is put into place.
6.3.3 Requirement Negotiation

After they have been collected, requirements must be analyzed to obtain a satisfactory
understanding of the customer’s need and negotiated to establish an agreed set of consistent
(unambiguous, correct, complete, etc.) requirements.
The requirements negotiation process is expensive and time-consuming, requiring very
experienced personnel exercising considerable judgment. This is exacerbated by the fact that the
requirements negotiation process is not sufficiently structured that an automated requirements
negotiation methodology would be appropriate.

6.3.4 Requirement Specification

For most engineering professions, the term “specification” refers to the assignment of numerical
values or limits to a product’s design goals. Typical physical systems have a relatively small

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