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Designing socio-technical systems: from stakeholder goals to social networks

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Abstract

Software systems are becoming an integral part of everyday life influencing organizational and social activities. This aggravates the need for a socio-technical perspective for requirements engineering, which allows for modelling and analyzing the composition and interaction of hardware and software components with human and organizational actors. In this setting, alternative requirements models have to be evaluated and selected finding a right trade-off between the technical and social dimensions. To address this problem, we propose a tool-supported process of requirements analysis for socio-technical systems, which adopts planning techniques for exploring the space of requirements alternatives and a number of social criteria for their evaluation. We illustrate the proposed approach with the help of a case study, conducted within the context of an EU project.

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Notes

  1. http://www.serenity-project.org/.

  2. Most of the planning algorithms return a (partially) ordered sequence of actions as a resulting plan.

  3. Another related approach is planning with preferences (see, e.g. [5]). However, for reasons similar to those for the planning metrics case, most plan evaluation criteria discussed in this section cannot be incorporated into planning with preferences.

  4. By action removal we mean, for instance, temporal unavailability of an actor or the failure of a communication link.

  5. This is not always the case, as sometimes actors may want the workload to be the maximum they can handle, e.g. in looking for the reward like salary increase or a the recognition of the boss/colleagues.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the anonymous reviewers for the valuable comments and suggestions. This work has been partially funded by EU Commission through the SERENITY project, by MEnSA-PRIN project, and by the Provincial Authority of Trentino through the STAMPS project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Ingegneria e Scienza dell’Informazione, University of Trento, via Sommarive 14, 38100, Povo (TN), Italy

    Volha Bryl, Paolo Giorgini & John Mylopoulos

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, 40 St George St., Toronto, ON, M5S 2E4, Canada

    John Mylopoulos

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  1. Volha Bryl
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  2. Paolo Giorgini
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  3. John Mylopoulos
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Correspondence to Volha Bryl.

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Bryl, V., Giorgini, P. & Mylopoulos, J. Designing socio-technical systems: from stakeholder goals to social networks. Requirements Eng 14, 47–70 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-008-0073-5

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