Jacob L Cybulski | Deakin University (original) (raw)
Papers by Jacob L Cybulski
RE is well-recognised as a creative problem solving activity by the systems development community... more RE is well-recognised as a creative problem solving activity by the systems development community. However, while substantial research has been conducted and knowledge gained about creativity in the general psychology of problem solving, creativity as it applies to RE remains a relatively unexplored area- one that has neither been comprehensively studied, nor highly recognised, as a research topic of importance. This paper attempts to address the abovementioned gap by presenting findings from a recent focus group study of creativity in RE as perceived by a group of RE practitioners. We provide a conceptual framework for understanding creativity in RE, which may be of use to requirements engineers attempting to
In many disciplines, creativity has been recognised as an important part of problem solving. In b... more In many disciplines, creativity has been recognised as an important part of problem solving. In business, creativity enables the generation of better solutions and provides an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. In Information Systems (IS) creativity assists developers in finding solutions to difficult problems by helping to efficiently utilise available resources and allows the more effective planning and running of complex projects. One of the most important aspects of IS development is Requirements Engineering (RE), the development activity aimed at understanding the needs and wants of IS customers. While previous RE researchers suggested that creativity is crucial in building high quality information systems, fostering creative outcomes in RE is difficult as it is affected by the multifaceted socioorganisational context within which IS development commonly takes place. This paper reports findings from an empirical study into creativity in RE. Specifically, it reports va...
17th International Conference on e-Society 2019, 2019
When referring to the value that IS adds to organisations, we often refer to monetary value and r... more When referring to the value that IS adds to organisations, we often refer to monetary value and rarely are perspectives extended beyond monetary significance. Research suggests that value of a product or service is often perceived subjectively by an individual. A sound understanding of value and its perception by IS stakeholders will be beneficial in developing information systems that create value for an organisation, which is well-received by their users. This paper therefore discusses the concepts of value and its importance in IS. The paper focuses on a challenge to studying value in IS-although value manifests in properties of an information system, it can only be experienced and perceived subjectively through sense, experience and judgement of the system stakeholders. To address this challenge, the paper suggests adopting a phenomenological approach to studying value as perceived by different stakeholders involved in the development and application of information systems.
Journal of Information Technology
The field of data science emerged in recent years, building on advances in computational statisti... more The field of data science emerged in recent years, building on advances in computational statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data. Modern organizations are immersed in data and are turning toward data science to address a variety of business problems. While numerous complex problems in science have become solvable through data science, not all scientific solutions are equally applicable to business. Many data-intensive business problems are situated in complex socio-political and behavioral contexts that still elude commonly used scientific methods. To what extent can such problems be addressed through data science? Does data science have any inherent blind spots in this regard? What types of business problems are likely to be addressed by data science in the near future, which will not, and why? We develop a conceptual framework to inform the application of data science in business. The framework draws on an extensive review of data science literature acr...
Effective reuse of software products is reportedly increasing productivity, saving time, and redu... more Effective reuse of software products is reportedly increasing productivity, saving time, and reducing cost of software development. Historically, software reuse focused on repackaging and reapplying of code modules, data structures or entire applications in the new software projects (Prieto-Diaz 1994). Recently, however, it has been acknowledged as beneficial to redeploy software components across the entire development life-cycle, starting with domain modelling and requirements specification, through software design, coding and testing, to maintenance and operation. There were also attempts to reuse aspects of project organisation and methodology, development processes, and communication structures. However, as the concept of reusing software components is very clear at the code level (whether in source or binary form), the very same concept becomes more fuzzy and difficult to grasp when discussed in the context of reusing specifications and designs (whether in textual or diagramma...
As a recent IT innovation, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system has become strategically imp... more As a recent IT innovation, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system has become strategically important to organizations. Yet ERP is difficult to implement, high failure rate has been reported. Researchers and practitioners have pointed out that ignorance of knowledge transfer from consultancy to client was the reason for poor ERP implementation experience considering ERP's complexity and high knowledge barrier on adopters. Although IT implementation and Innovation diffusion research has identified and empirically investigated various implementation success factors, few studies have empirically examined influential factors from knowledge transfer perspective. In this study, a model of ERP success antecedents is developed from the knowledge transfer, IT implementation, and innovation diffusion literatures. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the knowledge transfer related factors, together with well-established influential factors in both IT implementation and innovation literature, predict and explain the success of ERP implementation, which is complex and impose high knowledge barrier. A cross-sectional survey is being conducted in China to empirically examine this model.
Development of commercial web systems is laborious, lengthy and costly. This is partly due to the... more Development of commercial web systems is laborious, lengthy and costly. This is partly due to the fact that the methods of their development can hardly cope with the complexity of provided services. Such services may need to be distributed and collaborative, require sophisticated software architecture, be rich in form, content and interactivity, and have a wide range of potentially casual users. While web development methodologies are slowly emerging from research methodologies, their adoption is far from wide-spread. To improve this situation, the authors propose an approach based on the observed practices of professional web developers, who openly share and reuse their web development experience, while guarding their development workproducts. To this end, we suggest to enhance web development methods, by collecting problem-solving experience of web developers, packaging it into a reusable form, and providing a navigable decision structure assisting developers in identifying proven...
While the maturity and sophistication of web applications grow continually, web development pract... more While the maturity and sophistication of web applications grow continually, web development practices are still in their blissful state of adolescent innocence, with ad-hoc requirements identification, perpetual cycles of evolutionary prototyping, and uncontrollable change. Some put this situation down to the rapid expansion of web infrastructure, and others see the source of this problem in unparallel complexity of e-business services deployed across the Internet. Research described in this paper, however, reports yet another explanation of the issue, asserting that the difficulties in web-based applications development are due to the existence of a large body of non-homogenous application stakeholders, all having distinct business and personal concerns, which are frequently transparent to developers seeking identification of functional requirements, later refined and implemented as the features of a web system. To illustrate our point, we provide examples of two commercial web-ena...
Requirements reuse is an emerging field of software engineering research. This article introduces... more Requirements reuse is an emerging field of software engineering research. This article introduces its fundamental concepts. It begins with a brief review of the selected approaches to reusing software requirements. Then, the article builds a reuse framework for the requirements engineering process. Subsequently, it evaluates various methods and techniques that can be used to assist the process of requirements reuse. In our analysis, we look at the way requirements documents are created, manipulated and used across the entire cycle of requirements engineering. We consider activities preceding formulation of software requirements, such as elaboration of needs and objectives in the software project. We include requirements acquisition, specification and modelling. Generation and evaluation of alternative interpretations of requirements is also taken into consideration. Finally we review the tasks associated with the verification and validation of requirements specifications. In the pro...
This paper presents a phenomenological investigation of project managers’ experiences with the im... more This paper presents a phenomenological investigation of project managers’ experiences with the implementation of web-based employee service systems (ESS), a domain that has witnessed sharp growth in Australia in recent times. The rich, multidimensional account of project managers’ experiences with the implementation of ESS revealed the social obstacles and fragility of intraorganizational relationships that demanded a cautious and tactful approach. While arriving at such findings usually concludes the cyclical process of phenomenological study, Information Systems (IS) research usually demands some independent assessment of the empirical discovery, which led us to conducting a further study focusing on the evaluation of the collected and packaged project managers’ experience. This phenomenological evaluation is in the focus of this paper. By means of a small case study, this project engaged a number of professional teams to reflect upon the previously captured problem-solving experi...
This paper presents an assessment of system effectiveness in automatic requirements refinement by... more This paper presents an assessment of system effectiveness in automatic requirements refinement by comparing results obtained from experts and novices with those achieved by the system. As the investigated system was a combination of a tightly inter-connected methods and a tool, the evaluation framework melded together a number of distinct methodological approaches structured into three empirical studies, which aimed at the construction of a case problem domain, calibrating the system using this defined domain elements and finally using the calibrated system to assess its effectiveness. In consequence, it was concluded that the evaluated methods and tools were effective in supporting requirements refinement.
Reuse of software products resulting from the early phases of the development life-cycle is claim... more Reuse of software products resulting from the early phases of the development life-cycle is claimed to have a tremendous impact on the reduction of cost and enhanced productivity in software development [22]. As requirements engineering sets off the entire development process, consequently the reuse of its products will offer most significant benefits. Unfortunately, software requirements documents are still produced in the form and media which are inappropriate for subsequent computer representation and processing, not to mention their reuse. Besides, the lack of formality in the communication of software requirements is not only demanded by non-technical personnel, but in fact can also have some positive effects on requirements validation and traceability. And so the process of reusing software requirements will have to deal with the analysis of informal texts into their formal representation, their storage and organisation, and the synthesis of the new requirements documents of r...
This paper attempts to demonstrate the principles of hermeneutics in an effort to understand fact... more This paper attempts to demonstrate the principles of hermeneutics in an effort to understand factors affecting Information Systems (IS) projects. As hermeneutics provides a systematic method of interpreting text from multiple information sources, thus, Information Systems being prima facie defined and documented as text documents, are eminently suited for this mode of investigation. In this paper, we illustrate hermeneutics by analysing a sample case study document describing a well known project of Denver International Airport (DIA) Automated Baggage Handling System, which was extensively reported in IS and management press and studied by Montealegre and his colleagues (Montealegre, Nelson, Knoop, & Applegate, 1999, p553-554). As a result of the hermeneutic approach to the analysis of this document, a new "flexibility" factor has been discovered to play an important, yet unreported, role in the DIA system demise. In the DIA case, the observed flexibility factor influenced...
Information systems are changing the way artists and consumers create, use and interact with musi... more Information systems are changing the way artists and consumers create, use and interact with music. Music experience has become richer and more sophisticated than simply buying and listening to music. New links between IS and music are forging unprecedented levels of creative e-collaboration, innovative music technology development, new music commerce and marketing methods, alongside with the emergence of e-music communities nurturing up-and-coming artists careers. Distinct from non-creative industries, the music industry is at the forefront of technological innovation where the ubiquitous adoption of music downloading, widespread use of personal music systems, and value chain disintermediation has shifted the focus of value delivery towards consumer control. This paper provides new insights into the effect of recent technological change on stakeholders within the music industry value chain, and of music information systems upon creative music products. The paper further explores th...
Business process designers are increasingly being challenged to develop processes that are not on... more Business process designers are increasingly being challenged to develop processes that are not only useful in achieving business objectives but also accepted by the process participants and followed in the work place. Those objectives can only be achieved when both the business and the social/cultural aspects of the specific business environment are taken into account. Humans are not unaided individuals separated from a social group and from supporting artefacts but they are complemented by the environment in which they live in. This paper presents a novel framework for the design of business processes based on the application of activity system, providing a comprehensive framework of humans acting in the world, and the theory of affordances, representing action opportunities offered by the environment. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, it provides a theoretical contribution to affordance studies by offering a conceptual model that consolidates new developments in t...
There exist many web design methodologies and the new ones are constantly being added to the pool... more There exist many web design methodologies and the new ones are constantly being added to the pool of those offered to practitioners. However as previous research shows, practitioners either do not know, do not use or even do not care for these development approaches. This paper examines web design practice, and the design of visual aspects in particular, in order to establish whether any of the existing methodologies would actually address the practitioners concerns. Through grounded theory analysis, it transpires that from amongst several examined approaches, IS-based web design methods are dealing with great many practical issues which designers perceive as most pressing.
Designing a successful web project requires understanding not only of its owner's business an... more Designing a successful web project requires understanding not only of its owner's business and technological needs, as well as having the substantial management and development experience, but it also depends on a thorough knowledge of the system's application domain and of other existing systems in the domain. In order to gather such domain knowledge, it is necessary to identify the nature of the proposed web services venture with regards to other similar services offered in the domain, the business setting of enterprises that initiate such ventures, the various types of customers involved, and how these factors translate into requirements. In this paper, we present an approach to studying the domain of web-enabled Human Resource and payroll services with the aim of attaining design knowledge that would ensure customer satisfaction and could eventually pave the way to the successful implementation of web-enabled services.
This paper discusses the issue of formality in the process of requirements engineering. First, th... more This paper discusses the issue of formality in the process of requirements engineering. First, the paper emphasises the significance of capturing, recording and maintaining user’s original, sketchy, plain-English, statements of requirements. Such informal requirements are commonly used as a basis for stakeholders negotiation, they can be easily discussed and validated by the client community, and they can always be referred to in the subsequent development process. At the same time, we stress the importance of mapping informal requirements texts into their formal specification which could be regarded as a legal document between users and developers, and which could be used with confidence by developers as a complete, cohesive and unambiguous statement of client’s needs. We argue the benefits and the pitfalls of integrating the two approaches to expressing software requirements within a single development paradigm. We report a number methods coping with this duality of software requi...
Experiential simulations have been used effectively for teaching business, medicine and engineeri... more Experiential simulations have been used effectively for teaching business, medicine and engineering. Many are supported by computer systems that create artificial virtual spaces so learners can safely practice intricate professional skills. Surprising few attempts have been made to utilise such approaches in teaching IT/IS principles and requirements engineering (RE) in particular. This paper reports on FAB ATM, which is one of those few learning environments which rely on computer simulation and which have been designed specifically to train IS professionals, and in particular, develop their RE skills. In its framework, FAB ATM combines and balances elements of video-based computer simulation with activities, such as classroom instructions. This paper explains the principles of the FAB ATM design, its coverage of RE activities and the anecdotal experiences of students and staff that have used this environment in practice.
RE is well-recognised as a creative problem solving activity by the systems development community... more RE is well-recognised as a creative problem solving activity by the systems development community. However, while substantial research has been conducted and knowledge gained about creativity in the general psychology of problem solving, creativity as it applies to RE remains a relatively unexplored area - one that has neither been comprehensively studied, nor highly recognised, as a research topic of importance. This paper attempts to address the abovementioned gap by presenting findings from a recent focus group study of creativity in RE as perceived by a group of RE practitioners. We pro vide a conceptual framework for understanding creativity in RE, which may be of use to requirements engineers attempting to enable more creative approaches and results, as well as adding to the existing, limited body of research in this area.
RE is well-recognised as a creative problem solving activity by the systems development community... more RE is well-recognised as a creative problem solving activity by the systems development community. However, while substantial research has been conducted and knowledge gained about creativity in the general psychology of problem solving, creativity as it applies to RE remains a relatively unexplored area- one that has neither been comprehensively studied, nor highly recognised, as a research topic of importance. This paper attempts to address the abovementioned gap by presenting findings from a recent focus group study of creativity in RE as perceived by a group of RE practitioners. We provide a conceptual framework for understanding creativity in RE, which may be of use to requirements engineers attempting to
In many disciplines, creativity has been recognised as an important part of problem solving. In b... more In many disciplines, creativity has been recognised as an important part of problem solving. In business, creativity enables the generation of better solutions and provides an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. In Information Systems (IS) creativity assists developers in finding solutions to difficult problems by helping to efficiently utilise available resources and allows the more effective planning and running of complex projects. One of the most important aspects of IS development is Requirements Engineering (RE), the development activity aimed at understanding the needs and wants of IS customers. While previous RE researchers suggested that creativity is crucial in building high quality information systems, fostering creative outcomes in RE is difficult as it is affected by the multifaceted socioorganisational context within which IS development commonly takes place. This paper reports findings from an empirical study into creativity in RE. Specifically, it reports va...
17th International Conference on e-Society 2019, 2019
When referring to the value that IS adds to organisations, we often refer to monetary value and r... more When referring to the value that IS adds to organisations, we often refer to monetary value and rarely are perspectives extended beyond monetary significance. Research suggests that value of a product or service is often perceived subjectively by an individual. A sound understanding of value and its perception by IS stakeholders will be beneficial in developing information systems that create value for an organisation, which is well-received by their users. This paper therefore discusses the concepts of value and its importance in IS. The paper focuses on a challenge to studying value in IS-although value manifests in properties of an information system, it can only be experienced and perceived subjectively through sense, experience and judgement of the system stakeholders. To address this challenge, the paper suggests adopting a phenomenological approach to studying value as perceived by different stakeholders involved in the development and application of information systems.
Journal of Information Technology
The field of data science emerged in recent years, building on advances in computational statisti... more The field of data science emerged in recent years, building on advances in computational statistics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data. Modern organizations are immersed in data and are turning toward data science to address a variety of business problems. While numerous complex problems in science have become solvable through data science, not all scientific solutions are equally applicable to business. Many data-intensive business problems are situated in complex socio-political and behavioral contexts that still elude commonly used scientific methods. To what extent can such problems be addressed through data science? Does data science have any inherent blind spots in this regard? What types of business problems are likely to be addressed by data science in the near future, which will not, and why? We develop a conceptual framework to inform the application of data science in business. The framework draws on an extensive review of data science literature acr...
Effective reuse of software products is reportedly increasing productivity, saving time, and redu... more Effective reuse of software products is reportedly increasing productivity, saving time, and reducing cost of software development. Historically, software reuse focused on repackaging and reapplying of code modules, data structures or entire applications in the new software projects (Prieto-Diaz 1994). Recently, however, it has been acknowledged as beneficial to redeploy software components across the entire development life-cycle, starting with domain modelling and requirements specification, through software design, coding and testing, to maintenance and operation. There were also attempts to reuse aspects of project organisation and methodology, development processes, and communication structures. However, as the concept of reusing software components is very clear at the code level (whether in source or binary form), the very same concept becomes more fuzzy and difficult to grasp when discussed in the context of reusing specifications and designs (whether in textual or diagramma...
As a recent IT innovation, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system has become strategically imp... more As a recent IT innovation, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system has become strategically important to organizations. Yet ERP is difficult to implement, high failure rate has been reported. Researchers and practitioners have pointed out that ignorance of knowledge transfer from consultancy to client was the reason for poor ERP implementation experience considering ERP's complexity and high knowledge barrier on adopters. Although IT implementation and Innovation diffusion research has identified and empirically investigated various implementation success factors, few studies have empirically examined influential factors from knowledge transfer perspective. In this study, a model of ERP success antecedents is developed from the knowledge transfer, IT implementation, and innovation diffusion literatures. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the knowledge transfer related factors, together with well-established influential factors in both IT implementation and innovation literature, predict and explain the success of ERP implementation, which is complex and impose high knowledge barrier. A cross-sectional survey is being conducted in China to empirically examine this model.
Development of commercial web systems is laborious, lengthy and costly. This is partly due to the... more Development of commercial web systems is laborious, lengthy and costly. This is partly due to the fact that the methods of their development can hardly cope with the complexity of provided services. Such services may need to be distributed and collaborative, require sophisticated software architecture, be rich in form, content and interactivity, and have a wide range of potentially casual users. While web development methodologies are slowly emerging from research methodologies, their adoption is far from wide-spread. To improve this situation, the authors propose an approach based on the observed practices of professional web developers, who openly share and reuse their web development experience, while guarding their development workproducts. To this end, we suggest to enhance web development methods, by collecting problem-solving experience of web developers, packaging it into a reusable form, and providing a navigable decision structure assisting developers in identifying proven...
While the maturity and sophistication of web applications grow continually, web development pract... more While the maturity and sophistication of web applications grow continually, web development practices are still in their blissful state of adolescent innocence, with ad-hoc requirements identification, perpetual cycles of evolutionary prototyping, and uncontrollable change. Some put this situation down to the rapid expansion of web infrastructure, and others see the source of this problem in unparallel complexity of e-business services deployed across the Internet. Research described in this paper, however, reports yet another explanation of the issue, asserting that the difficulties in web-based applications development are due to the existence of a large body of non-homogenous application stakeholders, all having distinct business and personal concerns, which are frequently transparent to developers seeking identification of functional requirements, later refined and implemented as the features of a web system. To illustrate our point, we provide examples of two commercial web-ena...
Requirements reuse is an emerging field of software engineering research. This article introduces... more Requirements reuse is an emerging field of software engineering research. This article introduces its fundamental concepts. It begins with a brief review of the selected approaches to reusing software requirements. Then, the article builds a reuse framework for the requirements engineering process. Subsequently, it evaluates various methods and techniques that can be used to assist the process of requirements reuse. In our analysis, we look at the way requirements documents are created, manipulated and used across the entire cycle of requirements engineering. We consider activities preceding formulation of software requirements, such as elaboration of needs and objectives in the software project. We include requirements acquisition, specification and modelling. Generation and evaluation of alternative interpretations of requirements is also taken into consideration. Finally we review the tasks associated with the verification and validation of requirements specifications. In the pro...
This paper presents a phenomenological investigation of project managers’ experiences with the im... more This paper presents a phenomenological investigation of project managers’ experiences with the implementation of web-based employee service systems (ESS), a domain that has witnessed sharp growth in Australia in recent times. The rich, multidimensional account of project managers’ experiences with the implementation of ESS revealed the social obstacles and fragility of intraorganizational relationships that demanded a cautious and tactful approach. While arriving at such findings usually concludes the cyclical process of phenomenological study, Information Systems (IS) research usually demands some independent assessment of the empirical discovery, which led us to conducting a further study focusing on the evaluation of the collected and packaged project managers’ experience. This phenomenological evaluation is in the focus of this paper. By means of a small case study, this project engaged a number of professional teams to reflect upon the previously captured problem-solving experi...
This paper presents an assessment of system effectiveness in automatic requirements refinement by... more This paper presents an assessment of system effectiveness in automatic requirements refinement by comparing results obtained from experts and novices with those achieved by the system. As the investigated system was a combination of a tightly inter-connected methods and a tool, the evaluation framework melded together a number of distinct methodological approaches structured into three empirical studies, which aimed at the construction of a case problem domain, calibrating the system using this defined domain elements and finally using the calibrated system to assess its effectiveness. In consequence, it was concluded that the evaluated methods and tools were effective in supporting requirements refinement.
Reuse of software products resulting from the early phases of the development life-cycle is claim... more Reuse of software products resulting from the early phases of the development life-cycle is claimed to have a tremendous impact on the reduction of cost and enhanced productivity in software development [22]. As requirements engineering sets off the entire development process, consequently the reuse of its products will offer most significant benefits. Unfortunately, software requirements documents are still produced in the form and media which are inappropriate for subsequent computer representation and processing, not to mention their reuse. Besides, the lack of formality in the communication of software requirements is not only demanded by non-technical personnel, but in fact can also have some positive effects on requirements validation and traceability. And so the process of reusing software requirements will have to deal with the analysis of informal texts into their formal representation, their storage and organisation, and the synthesis of the new requirements documents of r...
This paper attempts to demonstrate the principles of hermeneutics in an effort to understand fact... more This paper attempts to demonstrate the principles of hermeneutics in an effort to understand factors affecting Information Systems (IS) projects. As hermeneutics provides a systematic method of interpreting text from multiple information sources, thus, Information Systems being prima facie defined and documented as text documents, are eminently suited for this mode of investigation. In this paper, we illustrate hermeneutics by analysing a sample case study document describing a well known project of Denver International Airport (DIA) Automated Baggage Handling System, which was extensively reported in IS and management press and studied by Montealegre and his colleagues (Montealegre, Nelson, Knoop, & Applegate, 1999, p553-554). As a result of the hermeneutic approach to the analysis of this document, a new "flexibility" factor has been discovered to play an important, yet unreported, role in the DIA system demise. In the DIA case, the observed flexibility factor influenced...
Information systems are changing the way artists and consumers create, use and interact with musi... more Information systems are changing the way artists and consumers create, use and interact with music. Music experience has become richer and more sophisticated than simply buying and listening to music. New links between IS and music are forging unprecedented levels of creative e-collaboration, innovative music technology development, new music commerce and marketing methods, alongside with the emergence of e-music communities nurturing up-and-coming artists careers. Distinct from non-creative industries, the music industry is at the forefront of technological innovation where the ubiquitous adoption of music downloading, widespread use of personal music systems, and value chain disintermediation has shifted the focus of value delivery towards consumer control. This paper provides new insights into the effect of recent technological change on stakeholders within the music industry value chain, and of music information systems upon creative music products. The paper further explores th...
Business process designers are increasingly being challenged to develop processes that are not on... more Business process designers are increasingly being challenged to develop processes that are not only useful in achieving business objectives but also accepted by the process participants and followed in the work place. Those objectives can only be achieved when both the business and the social/cultural aspects of the specific business environment are taken into account. Humans are not unaided individuals separated from a social group and from supporting artefacts but they are complemented by the environment in which they live in. This paper presents a novel framework for the design of business processes based on the application of activity system, providing a comprehensive framework of humans acting in the world, and the theory of affordances, representing action opportunities offered by the environment. The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, it provides a theoretical contribution to affordance studies by offering a conceptual model that consolidates new developments in t...
There exist many web design methodologies and the new ones are constantly being added to the pool... more There exist many web design methodologies and the new ones are constantly being added to the pool of those offered to practitioners. However as previous research shows, practitioners either do not know, do not use or even do not care for these development approaches. This paper examines web design practice, and the design of visual aspects in particular, in order to establish whether any of the existing methodologies would actually address the practitioners concerns. Through grounded theory analysis, it transpires that from amongst several examined approaches, IS-based web design methods are dealing with great many practical issues which designers perceive as most pressing.
Designing a successful web project requires understanding not only of its owner's business an... more Designing a successful web project requires understanding not only of its owner's business and technological needs, as well as having the substantial management and development experience, but it also depends on a thorough knowledge of the system's application domain and of other existing systems in the domain. In order to gather such domain knowledge, it is necessary to identify the nature of the proposed web services venture with regards to other similar services offered in the domain, the business setting of enterprises that initiate such ventures, the various types of customers involved, and how these factors translate into requirements. In this paper, we present an approach to studying the domain of web-enabled Human Resource and payroll services with the aim of attaining design knowledge that would ensure customer satisfaction and could eventually pave the way to the successful implementation of web-enabled services.
This paper discusses the issue of formality in the process of requirements engineering. First, th... more This paper discusses the issue of formality in the process of requirements engineering. First, the paper emphasises the significance of capturing, recording and maintaining user’s original, sketchy, plain-English, statements of requirements. Such informal requirements are commonly used as a basis for stakeholders negotiation, they can be easily discussed and validated by the client community, and they can always be referred to in the subsequent development process. At the same time, we stress the importance of mapping informal requirements texts into their formal specification which could be regarded as a legal document between users and developers, and which could be used with confidence by developers as a complete, cohesive and unambiguous statement of client’s needs. We argue the benefits and the pitfalls of integrating the two approaches to expressing software requirements within a single development paradigm. We report a number methods coping with this duality of software requi...
Experiential simulations have been used effectively for teaching business, medicine and engineeri... more Experiential simulations have been used effectively for teaching business, medicine and engineering. Many are supported by computer systems that create artificial virtual spaces so learners can safely practice intricate professional skills. Surprising few attempts have been made to utilise such approaches in teaching IT/IS principles and requirements engineering (RE) in particular. This paper reports on FAB ATM, which is one of those few learning environments which rely on computer simulation and which have been designed specifically to train IS professionals, and in particular, develop their RE skills. In its framework, FAB ATM combines and balances elements of video-based computer simulation with activities, such as classroom instructions. This paper explains the principles of the FAB ATM design, its coverage of RE activities and the anecdotal experiences of students and staff that have used this environment in practice.
RE is well-recognised as a creative problem solving activity by the systems development community... more RE is well-recognised as a creative problem solving activity by the systems development community. However, while substantial research has been conducted and knowledge gained about creativity in the general psychology of problem solving, creativity as it applies to RE remains a relatively unexplored area - one that has neither been comprehensively studied, nor highly recognised, as a research topic of importance. This paper attempts to address the abovementioned gap by presenting findings from a recent focus group study of creativity in RE as perceived by a group of RE practitioners. We pro vide a conceptual framework for understanding creativity in RE, which may be of use to requirements engineers attempting to enable more creative approaches and results, as well as adding to the existing, limited body of research in this area.