1. INTERACT 2011, September 9th, Lisboa
DESIGN AS INTERCULTURAL
DIALOGUE:
COUPLING HUMAN-CENTERED
DESIGN WITH REQUIREMENT
ENGINEERING METHODS
Chiara Leonardi, Luca Sabatucci, Angelo Susi, and
Massimo Zancanaro
Speaker: Luca Sabatucci, Software Engineering Unit, FBK

2. 2
ACube
• Critical Context
• Acceptability
• Privacy and Value
• Low Intrusiveness

3. 3
Human-Centered Design
Strengths Limits
• Ethnographic Study • Does not support
• Engagement of users traceability
• Concrete representation • Does not support
of the domain abstraction
• Stories prioritize • Coverage problem
requirements

4. The Tropos Methodology
An Overview
• Agent-oriented design process,
• Based on goal-oriented language and notation.
• The focus is on capturing intentional and strategic
dependencies among actors of a domain.
• Five phases: from early/later requirements to
architecture, implementation and deployment.
Giunchiglia et al. 2003. The Tropos Software Development Methodology:
Processes, Models and Diagrams. In Agent-Oriented Software Engineering
III, Springer

5. 5
Tropos
Strengths Lacks and Limits
• Strategic view of the • Prioritization of
domain requirements
• Analysis of motivations • Needs translation to
and dependencies involve users
• Check of quality and • Model mainly invariant
coverage elements of the domain
• Support traceability • Can’t model physical
context

6. Tropos and UCD:
a Promising Synergy
• Purpose:
• synergy without reducing advantages
• Enablers:
• Ground on information about people
• Similar “High Level” objectives (requirements)
• Similar Language (goal/need, actor/persona)
• Similar methodological approach (data exploration, filtering)

7. 7
Working Together
Integration Assimilation
• bridge the gap between • transform a specific
different research approach to make it fit
traditions into another one
• to work in a situation of
• to work in a situation of
methodological purity
methodological pluralism
• the risk is to loose the
• overhead for practitioners strength of one of the
approaches
• more complex for method
designer

8. The Common Meta-Model:
a lesson learned
UCD META-MODEL ?
TROPOS META-MODEL
? persona
wish
empathy
?
need
scenario
= difficulty in providing a precise semantics
Susi et al. 2005. The Tropos
Metamodel and its Use. = difficulty in identifying inter-concepts
relationships
INFORMATICA ?
= uncertainty to bridge concepts

9. 9
Ambiguity:
a different perspective

10. The Integrated Process
• Iterative process
• Design threads in parallel
• shared design vision
• common problem space
• no priority
• Inform without constraining
• Frequent, small evaluations

11. 11
The aim is to find under what
conditions our experience can be
generalized
• Strengths/limits analysis
RECIPE
• Making the divides explicit
• Mutual learning

12. Slide 12
Strengths/limits analysis
• It relies on the identification of strengths and limits
• This allows to define integration points to create a
beneficial dialogue
• It allows to preserve their strengths.

13. Slide 13
Making the divides explicit
Identifying barriers that may hinder the dialogue between
the two methods.
• Epistemological divides
• Linguistic and conceptual divides

14. Slide 14
Mutual learning
Mutual learning represent the crucial aspect to mediate
between the different epistemologies and languages
• Definition of a shared dictionary of terms (natural language)
• Collaborative negotiation of the definition of terms in the dictionary
which leads to discover hidden relationships between terms
• Iteration with refinement until the agreement

15. Operative Example CONTEXT
NARRATIVE
DESCRIPTION
TROPOS EARLY CRITICALITIES
REQUIREMENTS
PERSONAS/
SCENARIOS
• A criticality is a situation in the organization for which the
system is being designed.
• A criticality is represented as a view on the organization
model that focuses on highlighting actors, goals and tasks
when a critical situation occurs.
• The description is enriched with information about the
context in which the problem may occur and the impact
on the standard stakeholder activities.

16. 16
Conclusion
Strengths/Limits
Identify Barriers
Mutual Learning