Human factors in Critical Systems Design

Links to sources and other information used in the lecture

Part 1: Review of Human Factors literature

The review work was conducted during the REAIMS project, which was concerned with process improvement for Requirements Engineering. The project web pages contain links to the PERE module, which focused on the human and organisational factors in particular, but also to PREview, a viewpoint oriented approach to requirements engineering and also to process improvement. This has interesting tie-ins to the perspective contained in Bruce Robinson's paper about the London Ambulance Service case study.

The review has been published in the journal Interacting with Computers, and the full reference for it is:

Viller, S., Bowers, J. and Rodden, T. (1999), Human factors in requirements engineering: A survey of human sciences literature relevant to the improvement of dependable systems development processes, Interacting with Computers, 11 (6) : 665-698.

The paper includes the full review as presented, but in a lot more detail, plus full references to the human sciences literature used.

Part II: Case study on the London Ambulance Service (LAS) Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system

All the material presented for the case study came from the Report of the Inquiry into the London Ambulance Service (February 1993).

Prof. Anthony Finkelstein at UCL has a page of resources devoted to the LAS CAD system failure, including a pdf version of the inquiry report. The cause and effects diagram included with the lecture notes is on page 42 of the report.

The reference for the paper I provided is:

Robinson, B. (1994), Social context and conflicting interests, In Second BCS Conference on Information Systems Methodologies, 235-249, Edinburgh: British Computer Society.

A more readily available source for the case study, which provides extracts from the above paper, is pages 58-63 of Linda Macaulay's book Requirements Engineering (Springer Verlag, 1996)