Requirements Engineering for Cooperative Systems

This paper addresses the problem of ‘production-quality’ CSCW software development where software is developed from an agreed statement of the system requirements. In particular, we are concerned with ways in which requirements specifications for CSCW systems can be developed and with the integration of ethnography into traditional specification methods. Existing approaches to requirements engineering are briefly described as are our experiences of using ethnographic studies in systems requirements analysis. We suggest that existing requirements analysis methods and ethnography must both evolve to accommodate the strengths of the other approach to produce an effective and complete method of deriving cooperative system requirements. An investigation of the changes required to notations for system description and analysis methods is a longterm research goal. However, we suggest shorter-term results can be obtained by using integrated tools for ethnography and requirements capture.