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This article considers the extent to which action research can help local stakeholders tackle the permanent technological disruption in the media sector by reshaping journalistic production practices with original design by examining a specific case. The INJECT Norway (Innovative Journalism: Enhanced Creativity Tools) project was part of an EU Innovation Action with partners that included universities, technology companies, business consultancies, and local newspapers. The objective was to design a new tool for creativity support in journalism and stimulate innovation competence through a business ecosystem. The article evaluates the collaboration between academics and local partners in the Norwegian ecosystem regarding the workability of the new designs and the credibility of the approach. The evaluation is written as a chronological narrative of the project's collaboration from optimistic beginnings to eventual failure. The main findings reveal a tension between the academic researchers and the local project partners. Despite these tensions, the article concludes with a hopeful note about the current action research ecosystem: harnessing the power of students to mediate the relationship between academics and local partners.

A challenge associated with an ageing population is increased demand on health and social care, creating a greater need to enable persons to live independently in their own homes. Ambient assistant living technology aims to address this by monitoring occupants’ ‘activities of daily living’ using smart home sensors to alert caregivers to abnormalities in routine tasks and deteriorations in a person’s ability to care for themselves. However, there has been less focus on using sensing technology to monitor a broader scope of so-called ‘meaningful activities’, which promote a person’s emotional, creative, intellectual, and spiritual needs. In this paper, we describe the development of a toolkit comprised of off-the-shelf, affordable sensors to allow persons with dementia and Parkinson’s disease to monitor meaningful activities as well as activities of daily living in order to self-manage their life and well-being. We describe two evaluations of the toolkit, firstly a lab-based study to test the installation of the system including the acuity and placement of sensors and secondly, an in-the-wild study where subjects who were not target users of the toolkit, but who identified as technology enthusiasts evaluated the feasibility of the toolkit to monitor activities in and around real homes. Subjects from the in-the-wild study reported minimal obstructions to installation and were able to carry out and enjoy activities without obstruction from the sensors, revealing that meaningful activities may be monitored remotely using affordable, passive sensors. We propose that our toolkit may enhance assistive living systems by monitoring a wider range of activities than activities of daily living.

Objectives In response to the lack of digital support for older people to plan their lives for quality of life, research was undertaken to co-design and then evaluate a new digital tool that combined interactive guidance for life planning with a computerised model of quality of life. Method First, a workshop-based process for co-designing the SCAMPI tool with older people is reported. A first version of this tool was then evaluated over eight consecutive weeks by nine older people living in their own homes. Four of these people were living with Parkinson's disease, one with early-stage dementia, and four without any diagnosed chronic condition. Regular semi-structured interviews were undertaken with each individual older person and, where wanted, their life partner. A more in-depth exit interview was conducted at the end of the period of tool use. Themes arising from analyses of content from these interviews were combined with first-hand data collected from the tool's use to develop a description of how each older person used the tool over the 8 weeks. Results The findings provided the first evidence that the co-designed tool, and in particular the computerised model, could offer some value to older people. Although some struggled to use the tool as it was designed, which led to limited uptake of the tool's suggestions, the older people reported factoring these suggestions into their longer-term planning, as health and/or circumstances might change. Conclusions The article contributes to the evolving discussion about how to deploy such digital technologies to support quality of life more effectively.

This article considers the extent to which action research can help local stakeholders tackle the permanent technological disruption in the media sector by reshaping journalistic production practices with original design by examining a specific case. The INJECT Norway (Innovative Journalism: Enhanced Creativity Tools) project was part of an EU Innovation Action with partners that included universities, technology companies, business consultancies, and local newspapers. The objective was to design a new tool for creativity support in journalism and stimulate innovation competence through a business ecosystem. The article evaluates the collaboration between academics and local partners in the Norwegian ecosystem regarding the workability of the new designs and the credibility of the approach. The evaluation is written as a chronological narrative of the project's collaboration from optimistic beginnings to eventual failure. The main findings reveal a tension between the academic researchers and the local project partners. Despite these tensions, the article concludes with a hopeful note about the current action research ecosystem: harnessing the power of students to mediate the relationship between academics and local partners.

Scenarios have been advocated as a means of improving requirements engineering yet few methods or tools exist to support scenario based RE. The paper reports a method and software assistant tool for scenario based RE that integrates with use case approaches to object oriented development. The method and operation of the tool are illustrated with a financial system case study. Scenarios are used to represent paths of possible behavior through a use case, and these are investigated to elaborate requirements. The method commences by acquisition and modeling of a use case. The use case is then compared with a library of abstract models that represent different application classes. Each model is associated with a set of generic requirements for its class, hence, by identifying the class(es) to which the use case belongs, generic requirements can be reused. Scenario paths are automatically generated from use cases, then exception types are applied to normal event sequences to suggest possible abnormal events resulting from human error. Generic requirements are also attached to exceptions to suggest possible ways of dealing with human error and other types of system failure. Scenarios are validated by rule based frames which detect problematic event patterns. The tool suggests appropriate generic requirements to deal with the problems encountered. The paper concludes with a review of related work and a discussion of the prospects for scenario based RE methods and tools.

This paper describes the application of requirements engineering concepts to support the analysis of the impact of new software systems on system-wide goals. Requirements on a new or revised software component of a socio-technical system not only have implications on the goals of the subsystem itself, but they also impact upon the goals of the existing integrated system. In industries such as air traffic management and healthcare, impacts need to be identified and demonstrated in order to assess concerns such as risk, safety, and accuracy. A method called PiLGRIM was developed which integrates means-end relationships within goal modelling with knowledge associated with the application domain. The relationship between domain knowledge and requirements, as described in a satisfaction argument, adds traceability rationale to help determine the impacts of new requirements across a network of heterogeneous actors. We report procedures that human analysts follow to use the concepts of satisfaction arguments in a software tool for i* goal modelling. Results were demonstrated using models and arguments developed in two case studies, each featuring a distinct socio-technical system—a new controlled airspace infringement detection tool for NATS (the UK’s air navigation service provider), and a new version of the UK’s HIV/AIDS patient reporting system. Results provided evidence towards our claims that the conceptual integration of i* and satisfaction arguments is usable and useful to human analysts, and that the PiLGRIM impact analysis procedures and tool support are effective and scalable to model and analyse large and complex socio-technical systems.

This paper considers the role of power and politics in requirements engineering (RE). It presents a brief working definition of both terms and provides an overview of existing literature both in RE and related disciplines. It argues that, given the increased complexity, uncertainty, and organisational embeddedness faced by RE in practice, power and politics have necessarily become increasingly relevant factors, but that they have not yet been given adequate consideration. A framework for analysis is presented, examining power and politics in turn through the structure of power relations and the process of decision-making. This framework is explored by applying it to a case study of a website development in a publishing company. The use of a case study is intended to demonstrate the proposed framework, perform an initial validation of it, and an assessment of its utility to RE.

Commercial off the shelf software can save development time and money if you can find a package that meets your customer's needs. The authors propose a model for matching COTS product features with user requirements. To support requirements acquisition for selecting commercial off the shelf products, we propose a method we used recently for selecting a complex COTS software system that had to comply with over 130 customer requirements. The lessons we learned from that experience refined our design of PORE (procurement oriented requirements engineering), a template based method for requirements acquisition. We report 11 of these lessons, with particular focus on the typical problems that arose and solutions to avoid them in the future. These solutions, we believe, extend state of the art requirements acquisition techniques to the component based software engineering process.

Requirements analysts need to ask the right questions repeatedly. They need to be more inquisitive and know why people want things as well as what happens beforehand. This requires them to become less inhibited and keep asking questions until they and their stakeholders are satisfied with the answers.