Coherence home
Ethnography in systems design
Viewpoint oriented requirements
Use case and OO analysis
Coherence papers
Bibliography
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The Coherence project
Coherence is a three year EPSRC-funded project investigating the problem of integrating ethnographically informed analysis into a systematic approach to systems design.Coherence is an attempt to apply several findings from research into the use of ethnographic methods in systems design. The approach taken is to adopt a number of perspectives on the social nature of work which have arisen out of numerous ethnographic studies. These perspectives are taken as the starting point for analysis of the social aspects of a workplace that is under study, in advance of the introduction of a new system. In order to provide a systematic framework for the conduct and recording of the analysis, Coherence has adopted the notion of viewpoints, which allow for several perspectives on a particular design to be expressed and ultimately reconciled in some way. We are concerned not to create yet another method that must be learned and adopted in preference to existing approaches to design. Rather, the Coherence approach is intended to be used early on in a standard development process, and can be used to assist in the identification and refinement of use cases which in turn lead to the development of object models and so on.
Current Results
We've had our paper accepted for publication in the IJHCS special issue on Understanding work and designing artefacts. It examines how Coherence focuses analysis on the social aspects of workplaces, and feeds the results through to use case and object models. The paper uses a case study from Air Traffic Control to illustrate the approach.Our workshop entitled An Industrial Approach to Work Analysis and Software Design was held at Lancaster University on Thursday 29 April 1999. Follow the link for more details.
Our paper situating Coherence with respect to previous work at Lancaster on ethnographically informed design has been accepted for presentation at RE'99.
Our paper on using UML to represent social aspects of workplaces has been accepted for publication in the HCI journal special issue on Representations in Interactive Software Development. The paper is concerned with notational aspects of Coherence, and demonstrates that UML can be used to represent features of work that are highlighted by Coherence's social analysis.
See the Coherence papers page for more details.
Background material
The background to Coherence falls into three main categories:
- Ethnographic studies as an input to the requirements process.
- Viewpoint oriented requirements as a means of structuring and presenting the results.
- Use cases and object oriented analysis as a means of modelling the requirements and linking through to the rest of the development process.
Coherence papers
Papers on Coherence, slides from presentations and various background work are available here.
Lancaster personnel
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