Towards Acceptance of Socio-technical Systems - An Emphasis on the Requirements Phase

This paper is not a technical research paper, but discusses some essential reasons why socio-technical systems do not get the acceptance by end-users that is typically needed for a successful usage of the systems. One major prerequisite to achieve sufficient acceptance is to ensure a specific treatment of end-users, and stakeholders in general during the requirements engineering phase. Reasons for resulting low acceptance of socio-technical systems in the requirements phase are discussed both, from an industry as well as from an academic perspective. 1 Extended Abstract In the development of socio-technical systems, the requirements engineering phase is essential for the later acceptance of the systems by its stakeholders. Important, especially non-technical aspects of the system such as ethical, legal, as well as cultural aspects can be identified in this phase and serve as an important requirements basis for the further system development. Furthermore, they serve as the basis for quality assurance, i.e., are the baseline to evaluate a socio-technical product before it is released to its end-users. The discipline of Requirements Engineering as sub-discipline of Software Engineering is established in academia since about 20 years [IE93]. Nevertheless, we can find a multitude of socio-technical systems in our society that find no or only low acceptance at its end-users. The reasons for this are discussed in the following by taking the perspective of industry-related reasons as well as academia-related reasons. Although we can see an increasing usage of requirements engineering methods, techniques and tools in the recent years, there is still a low spread of requirements engineering techniques and methods in industry. Additionally, if requirements engineering is performed in industry, it is often treated with a rather technical perspective. This means that only few approaches in industry make use of methods that have a strong emphasis on stakeholder analysis, or integrate with user centered design 1169