Towards anticipating requirements changes through studies of the future

Abstract

Whilst it is considered a good practice to focus Requirements Engineering on current stakeholder needs, the high costs implied by requirements changes and the emergence of the Autonomic Computing paradigm raised the need for dealing with issues that are not currently requirements but that may come to be in the future. This work shows how foresight techniques can be used for requirements elicitation, and discusses the impacts of studying the future to that requirements engineering activity. In particular, it addresses the use of the Futures Wheel method to enrich goal models.

Prospective ergonomics: origin, goal, and prospects

“…For instance, [8] organized foresight methods in eight categories according to the goal to be achieved: i) Collect judgement from experts, ii) Forecast time series and other quantitative measures, iii) Understand the linkages between events, trends and actions, iv) Determine a course of action in the presence of uncertainty, v) Portray alternative plausible futures; vi) Reach an understanding of whether the future is improving, vii) Track changes and assumptions, and viii) Determine the stability of a system. For each of these categories, there are different methods either to collect data (e.g., Delphi), carry out analyses (e.g., Regression analysis, Trend impact analysis), do modeling (e.g., Futures wheel method : see [15], and run simulation (e.g., scenarios, simulation and gaming). In the human sciences, participatory methods with domain experts (e.g., the method "staffs of communities experts" from [4]), with super users of artefacts, and creative people promise to be excellent for anticipating changes, detecting trends, and generating new ideas.…”

Responsible research and innovation: Critical reflection into the potential social consequences of ICT

“…Interestingly, ICT researchers have been investigating the use of scenarios to identify potential challenges with future implementation of technologies [33,34], and others in RE have suggested the use of foresight techniques [35]. Even so, we find that many researchers may be reluctant to engage in critical reflection where they, at times implied, and at other times explicitly stated that if such descriptions were made public and written into proposals it might adversely effect their successes at gaining funding.…”

Anticipating Requirements Changes-Using Futurology in Requirements Elicitation

“…Additionally, it would be interesting to provide more formalized guidance rules for creating and analyzing Futures Wheel models Other than that, we intend to perform a thorough analysis on how foresight methods can be used in the development of autonomic systems. This includes analyzing other foresight methods, as those Characteristic Advantages of having a representation of the future Selfconfiguration Allows early planning of some required adaptations Selfoptimization Allows long-term decisions during runtime Self-healing Allows early planning on how to deal with some problems Self-protection Allows early planning on how to deal with some attacks presented in (Pimentel, Castro, Perrelli, Santos & Franch, 2011). Lastly, we intend to investigate the possibility of using foresight methods in other software engineering disciplines, such as architectural design and system testing.…”

“…The foresight methods can be classified as qualitative or quantitative, and they may have other uses than just future studies, as is the case in Econometrics (Heckman & Leamer, 2007) and Scenarios (Schwartz, 1991), among others. In a previous paper we presented a survey on foresight methods, on which seventeen methods that may be used for requirements elicitation were identified and briefly described: Delphi, Futures Wheel, Participatory methods, Econometrics forecast, Regression Analysis, Trend Impact Analysis, Structural Analysis, System Dynamics, Agent Modeling, Cross Impact Analysis, Relevance Trees, Simulation Modeling, Multiple Perspectives, Causal Layered Analysis, Scenarios, Field Anomaly Relaxation, and Simulation & Gaming (Pimentel, Castro, Perrelli, Santos & Franch, 2011).…”