Coherence: Social Analysis for Software Engineers

It is increasingly recognised that human, social, and political factors have a significant impact on software system design. To address this, ethnographic studies of work have been used to inform the system design process, especially in cooperative work settings where systems support several users working together. Based on our experience of these studies, we have investigated the integration of social analysis into the system design process. This paper introduces a method that provides support for social analysis and which has been designed for use alongside other approaches to system requirements analysis. New methods are unlikely to be adopted in industry unless they are capable of being integrated with existing practice. Our approach addresses this issue by helping identify use cases, generating initial use case models, and by using UML to represent social aspects of work that may have an impact on the design of computer based systems. This paper introduces the approach, and focuses on the support provided for social analysis. We have identified three social viewpoints, namely a distributed coordination viewpoint, a plans and procedures viewpoint and an awareness of work viewpoint. We illustrate our approach using a case study based on an air traffic control system.