Coherence papers

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Abstract
It is increasingly recognised that human, social, and political factors have a significant impact on software systems design. To address this, ethnographic studies of work have been used to inform the systems 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 systems design process by developing an integrated approach to social and object oriented analysis.

New methods are unlikely to be adopted in industry unless they can be integrated with existing practice. Our approach, called Coherence, 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. Coherence is the fusion of two well-established strands of research on ethnographically informed design and viewpoint-oriented requirements engineering. This paper introduces Coherence, 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. Coherence is illustrated using a case study based on an air traffic control system.

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Abstract
Over a number of years, we have been involved in investigations into using workplace observation to inform requirements for complex systems. This paper discusses how our work has evolved from ethnography with prototyping through presentation of ethnographic fieldwork to developing a method for social analysis that has been derived from our experience of applying ethnographic techniques. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each of these approaches with a particular focus on our most recent work in developing the Coherence method. This method is based on a fusion of viewpoint-oriented and ethnographic approaches to requirements engineering and uses an industry-standard notation (UML) to represent knowledge of work. We use a common example of an air traffic control system to illustrate each approach.

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Abstract
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.

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Abstract
This paper is concerned with how to represent in system design the kinds of features of work settings as reported by ethnographic studies of work. Various researchers and practitioners have found that ethnomethodological analyses of work settings can provide useful insights to the work processes and settings that system design is interested in. Previously at Lancaster, we have examined ways in which ethnography can be used in the design process, and how the results of ethnographic analyses can be presented in such a way as to be useful components of the design process. This paper reflects an effort to approach these methodological issues from a different perspective, by examining how the lessons learned from ethnographic studies can be reflected in the design process itself, and in particular how standardised design artefacts (models, documents, etc.) can express the type of information which ethnographic studies produce.

The paper focuses on how ethnographic analyses can influence the main representational artefact in systems design-the model of the system being developed. We examine how the Unified Modelling Language (UML) for object-oriented design can be used to express information about awareness in cooperative systems.

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Coherence presentations

• Viller, Stephen Modelling the results of ethnographically informed analyses Talk given at SEBPC Modelling theme workshop, Manchester, 28th January 1998.

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• Viller, Stephen Mind the gap! Bridging from social analyses to system design Talk given at NUKAIS/ NISG Workshop: Formalism revisited: bridging the gap between the Social and Technical in Information Systems design, York, 8th July 1998.

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