Date: Wed, 13 Oct 93 09:10:54 BST To: re-world@doc.ic.ac.uk From: acwf@doc.ic.ac.uk (Anthony Finkelstein) X-Sender: acwf@gummo.doc.ic.ac.uk Subject: REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER (13) ****************REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING NEWSLETTER******************** No. 13. 1. Course on Ethnography applied to RE (Colston Sanger) 2. SW Architecture Special Issue of TSE (Dewayne Perry) Contents Contributions to: re-list@doc.ic.ac.uk (will be moderated) Subscription or Removal to: re-request@doc.ic.ac.uk Back issues can be obtained via anonymous ftp from ftp-host: dse.doc.ic.ac.uk (IP number: 146.169.2.20). Directory: requirements. Files are called renl1, renl2, etc. If you cannot use ftp then you can get any back issues using email. Send email containing the following to ftpmail@doc.ic.ac.uk open dse.doc.ic.ac.uk cd requirements get quit ********************************************************************** Subject: Course on Ethnography applied to RE From: Colston Sanger COMPLEX INFORMATION SYSTEMS: A NEW APPROACH FOR ANALYSING REQUIREMENTS Kensington Park Hotel, London Tuesday, 2 November 1993 Organised by CRICT, the Centre for Research into Innovation, Culture & Technology at Brunel University, in association with the UK CSCW Special Interest Group and the Department of Trade & Industry * Are you involved in the design of information systems that support work groups as well as individuals? * Are you concerned about the failure of information systems to meet the needs of inter-disciplinary teams? * Do you regard insights into the interactions between users as fundamental to effective systems design? As the role of information systems changes we need to develop new approaches for capturing requirements and evaluating systems. Traditionally, designers sought specifications based on the functional requirements of individuals using centralised information systems. The emphasis is now on: * Usability * Groups of users * Decentralised systems The cost of continuing to rely on conventional techniques is substantial. Users are required to invest time and effort to help identify requirements for systems that, after implementation, require enormous commitment in terms of evaluation, training and maintenance. These systems may support individual tasks but, by ignoring the relationships between tasks and users, they hinder the natural group working processes. As an alternative to conventional approaches many requirements analysts are exploring the potential of ethnography. This is a method of participant observation, drawn from the social sciences, that has been exploited to great effect in information systems design and implementation by innovative companies such as Rank Xerox. The benefits of this approach include: * An increased understanding of the nature of different tasks. * An insight into the inter-disciplinary relationships that characterise many working environments. * An appreciation of the social interactions that influence the effectiveness of work groups. CRICT, responding to the demand expressed by participants at recent conferences and seminars, has decided to bring together some of the UK's most experienced ethnographers working in the fields of requirements analysis, systems design and implementation to teach the basic principles of ethnography. Aims The tutors will work through a series of case studies and practical exercises with the participants. On completing the course the participants will be able to: * Understand the need to analyse the social setting in which work takes place when considering information systems requirements. * Appreciate the advantages of ethnography compared with other techniques for analysing the social character of the workplace (e.g. surveys, laboratory experiments). * Utilise ethnography to expand the description of the working environment obtained from existing techniques. * Determine the implications for requirements based on an analysis of ethnographic data. The event will be held at the prestigious Kensington Park Hotel in London. Target Audience Human factors specialists Requirements engineers CSCW designers Managers responsible for requirements and usability R&D professionals IT consultants Course Content * Introduction: demonstrate the need to analyse the social working environment drawing on examples of systems that have failed due to their inability to support the social character of work. * Background: overview of ethnography and comparison with other techniques of social investigation. * Interveiw design and observation techniques. * Case studies: comprehensive reports of 2 ethnographic studies to highlight the contrasting perspective an ethnographic study confers on an information systems development project: - A video-based case study of a busy stock market trading office; - A presentation of a study in an air-traffic control room. * Practical sessions: participants will determine the implications for requirements from actual data captured on video and audio tape. * Future developments: Group discussion on the potential contribution of ethnography to complex information system design and development. Tutors Dr John Bowers lectures Psychology at Manchester University, and has worked on various EC funded projects involving CSCW. He has also undertaken collaborative research with Rank Xerox Cambridge EuroPARC John Hughes (Professor of Sociological Analysis, Lancaster University) has spent the last few years researching alongside Computer Scientists including studies of air traffic control, police system developers and the financial sector. His special interest has been investigating the field of Computer Supported Co-operative Working (CSCW). Marina Jirotka works at the Centre for Requirements and Foundations at Oxford University Computing Laboratory. Her first degree is Social Anthropology and Psychology, her second Computing and Artificial Intelligence. Her work has concentrated on knowledge elicitation, acquisition and representation and she has experience of investigating human computer interaction. She has also taken part in developing prototype systems to investigate the nature of interaction of groups of users. Dr Janet Low (CRICT) has conducted an ethnographic study within a System Design team where she focused primarily on the team itself and the design methodology they used. Previous research has been in management and organisations studies. Steve Woolgar, Director of CRICT, and Professor of Sociology at Brunel university has been involved in a number of ethnographic studies of technological development. The most comprehensive of which was the study of the development of a range of new personal computers. He has also pioneered the application of techniques developed in the Social Study of Science to the study of technology. Course Outline * Introduction to the concept of Ethnography, its anthropological origins, and its modern application in technology design and use. * Case studies from PC design, Air Traffic Control, and Dealing Rooms. * Using Practical Concepts such as `working division of labour', `interaction analysis', `conversation analysis' * Using video based ethnography - putting the ideas into practice * Techniques for evaluation, combining quantitative metrics in the process, getting corporate support. * Group discussion on potential contribution of ethnography for participants' own contexts. Registration The registration fee for the course covers attendance, copy of the course materials, lunches and light refreshments. Please complete and return this registration form along with a cheque for 250 UK pounds made payable to Brunel University as soon as possible. Please register me for the course Complex Information Systems: A New Approach for Analysing Requirements at the Kensington Park Hotel, London on Tuesday, 2 November 1993. Surname(Mr/Ms)_____________________________________________________________ First Name_________________________________________________________________ Job Title__________________________________________________________________ Department_________________________________________________________________ Organisation_______________________________________________________________ Address____________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________________________________ Telephone______________________________Fax_________________________________ Email______________________________________________________________________ Are there any topics or questions you would particularly like addressed? __________________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________________ Cheque value 250 UK pounds is enclosed (Course fee): Please invoice my company for the course fee: If you have to cancel your registration please note the following terms: Cancellations made up to 15 working days before the seminar: 10% of the invoice will be due. After that date the full amount of the invoice is payable. Substitutions can be accepted at any time. All cancellations must be received in writing. Please return this form to: MS CLARE FISHER CRICT BRUNEL UNIVERSITY UXBRIDGE MIDDX UB8 3PH UK Tel: 0895 203126 Fax: 0895 203155 Email: janet.low@brunel.ac.uk ********************************************************************** Subject: SW Architecture Special Issue of TSE From: dep@research.att.com (Dewayne Perry) Dear Colleague, David Garlan and I will be the guest editors of a special issue of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering devoted to Software Architecture. While the official call for papers will appear in the next issue of TSE, we wanted to let people working in the field know about the issue as soon as possible. As you will see, the deadline for submission is February 1, with the publication planned for Fall 1994. The areas of interest range over a wide variety of issues related to Software Architecture, and we hope you will consider submitting an article, and/or encourage your colleagues to do likewise. If you have any questions about the issue, please feel free to send us mail. David Garlan Dewayne Perry garlan@cs.cmu.edu dep@research.att.com _____________________________________________________________________ Advance Call For Papers IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Special Issue on Software Architecture Guest Editors: David Garlan (CMU) and Dewayne Perry (AT&T Bell Laboratories) For large and complex software systems, software architecture -- that is, the design of and rationale for overall system structure -- emerges as a central problem. General issues include overall structural, control and data organization, modes of interactions among architectural components, the determination and selection of architectural alternatives, and the satisfaction of quality, economic and performance constraints. Recently, this area has become the focus of an increasingly large body of research and development in areas such as architectural description languages, graphical design notations, codification of common architectural elements, patterns and styles, architectural templates and frameworks for systems that serve the needs of specific domains, module interconnection languages, and formal models of component integration mechanisms. For this special issue of Transactions on Software Engineering, we solicit papers describing new research results in the broad area of software architecture. Within this area topics of particular interest include: * Architecture Description Languages Notations for specifying and representing architectures, advanced module interconnection languages. * Formal Underpinnings of Software Architecture Formal models of architectures, mathematical foundations for modularization and system composition, formal characterizations of non-functional properties, theories of architectural connection. * Architectural Analysis Techniques Techniques for determining and predicting properties of an architectural descriptions, relationships between architectural constraints and the ability to perform specialized analyses, abstraction techniques that make analysis practical for large systems. * Architectural Development Methods Process models that support architectural design, methods that support reuse of architectural designs across several product efforts, relationships between architectural styles and methods of development. * Architecture Recovery and Reuse Extraction of architectural design from existing systems, reinterpretation of architectural descriptions in simple terms, unification of related architectural designs, abstraction and generalization of domain-specific components. * Architectural Codification and Guidance Selection of alternative architectural styles, patterns and elements, codification and exploitation of architectural experience. Organization of architectural elements, principles for comparison of architectural elements, patterns and styles, systematic description of architectural spaces. * Tools and Environments for Architectural Design Analysis tools, architecture and design environments, component and application generators. Component Integration Mechanisms: Module interconnection, mediation, wrappers, novel composition techniques. * Software Architecture Case Studies and Experience Reports that Emphasize Architectural Principles Descriptions of exemplary architectural designs. Domain-specific software architectures, Application-frameworks, reference architectures. Retrospective analyses of industrial architectural development, model problems. This issue is expected to appear in Fall 1994. Submitted papers must not have been previously published or be curently under consideration for publication elsewhere. 6 copies of the complete manuscript should be submitted by February 1, 1994 to either of the Guest Editors: David Garlan Department of Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15213 Dewayne E. Perry At&T Bell Laboratories Room 2B-431 600 Mountain Avenue Murray Hill, NJ 07974 **********************************************************************