Kristina Pitula

On eliciting requirements from end-users in the ICT4D domain

Currently, there is much interest in harnessing the potential of new and affordable Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) such as mobile phones, to assist in reducing disparities in socioeconomic conditions throughout the world. Such efforts have come to be known as ICT for Development or ICT4D. Although this field of research holds much promise, few projects have managed to achieve long-term sustained success. Among the many reasons for this, from a software engineering perspective, in many cases, it can be attributed to inadequacies in gathering and defining software requirements. Incomplete software requirements and the consequent failures in creating sustainable systems arise because of inadequate consideration of the high-level social development goals, neglect of environmental constraints and/or a lack of adequate input from end-users regarding their specific needs and socio-cultural context. We propose enhancements to the requirements elicitation methodology specifically adapted to address these shortcomings. Our approach incorporates the novel technique of Structured Digital Storytelling to elicit input from end-users who have limited literacy and applies a conceptual model derived from Communications Theory to analyse the constraints that arise from their socio-cultural context. The needs, goals and constraints thus identified are integrated using a goal-based analysis to produce a more informed understanding of the potential areas of technology intervention and the needed software requirements. We illustrate our approach and validate its effectiveness with a field study.

A Set of Heuristic Measurements for Evaluating the Inclusiveness of a Technology

At a high level of abstraction,’ social inclusion’ can be defined as the extent to which an individual or community can fully participate in society and control their own collective destiny. There are large disparities in this, particularly in underdeveloped rural areas of the world. Information and communication technologies designed to address this disparity must take into account the many barriers in the use of technology that these communities face. We define an ’inclusive technology’ as a technology which overcomes the barriers to using technology inherent within a given community and increases the opportunities available to that community. We propose a conceptual model and a set of heuristic measurements for examining the ’inclusiveness’ of a technology with respect to a given community, and illustrate their use by applying them to two real-world projects. By proposing this model and set of measurements, we hope to achieve a better understanding of’development projects’ and create a systematic process and a framework to assist software engineers in designing and evaluating software based services intended to reduce the Digital Divide.

Structured Digital Storytelling for Eliciting Software Requirements in the ICT4D Domain

Due to the specific challenges that ICT4D projects present, conventional requirements elicitation techniques are often inapplicable or insufficient. We address this shortcoming by introducing structured digital storytelling (SDS) as an alternative elicitation technique especially suited for the ICD4D domain. SDS is supported by our mobile elicitation tool designed around the needs and capabilities of the targeted user population. We embed SDS in a requirements elicitation and specification process which commences with an initial domain analysis of the needs, goals, and tasks of the target population with respect to the high-level social development goals. The outcome of the preliminary domain analysis is used to formulate a set of questions for guiding the story narration. Once the stories are elicited, they are processed and the results are fed into a traditional requirements specification process. In this paper we propose a task-analytic approach for determining the topics of the guiding questions.