Critical software needs to obtain an assessment before commissioning. This assessment is given after a long task of software analysis performed by assessors. They may be helped by tools, used interactively, to build models using information-flow analysis. Tools like SPARK-Ada exist for Ada subsets used for critical software. But some emergent languages such as those of the ML family lack such a...

Information retrieval tries to identify relevant documents for an information need. The problems that an IR system should deal with include document indexing (which tries to extract important content from a document), user needs analysis (similar to document indexing but applied to a query), and their internal representation which makes them suitable for being explicitly manipulated by the corr...

Healthy living is an increasingly important topic on the agenda of policy makers. Containment of health care cost through public health and specific prevention programs is seen as a key element of the current social-economic policies in the western world. mHealth technology holds the promise to make healthy living more effective than traditional prevention programs. As part of a broad healthy l...

This paper considers the technology needs for autonomous underwater vehicles as the middle layer of a three-layer process. The first layer is the high level User Requirement, which may be stated in the form of business objectives such as ‘competitive running cost’ or ‘less than 1 hour per week downtime’. These business objectives map on to the middle layer of specific, but generic technology ne...

The design of eHealth systems calls for a clear needs analysis and functions based on the users’ perspective. However, this is often the most difficult part of designing eHealth service systems, because of the diversity of users and diversified needs. This paper provides a general mapping and overview of the basic functions of eHealth systems identified through two studies: (1) a comprehensive ...

EAP plays a highly important role in countries where English is used mainly for academic purposes. However, EAP programs have been developed without conducting a systematic needs analysis from both the students’ and instructors’ perspective. The purpose of this study is to describe the perception that EAP students and instructors have of the problematic areas in EAP programs. A total of 693 EAP...

Current tools for multidisciplinary teams in user-centered software engineering (UCSE) provide little support for the different approaches of the various disciplines in the project team. Although multidisciplinary teams are getting more and more involved in UCSE projects, an efficient approach to communicate clearly and to pass results of a user needs analysis to other team members without loss...

* Adnan Tahir is an Assistant Professor (Humanities) at COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Wah, Pakistan. He has a vast experience of teaching English as a Second Language, Technical & Research Writing and Business Communication at various levels, along with the experience as a teacher trainer. His research interests include teacher socialization and professional development, English ...

Scenario-based User Needs Analysis or SUNA is a method for envisioning, clarifying and refining ideas for developing software products and services usually where there are two or more parties involved. Its strengths lie in the elicitation and analysis of user needs encapsulated in ‘day in the life of’ style scenarios, and the management of collaboration. The use of a workshop based process comb...