Employing resilience engineering in eliciting software requirements for complex systems: experiments with the functional resonance analysis method (FRAM)

Resilience engineering provides concepts and methods for assessing the ability of socio-technical systems to adjust their functioning before, during, or after changes or disturbances. As such, this field of study has great potential to contribute to software engineering—particularly for the requirem...

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Published inCognition, technology & work Vol. 23; no. 1; pp. 65 - 83
Main Authors de Carvalho, Elaine Alves, Gomes, José Orlando, Jatobá, Alessandro, da Silva, Mônica Ferreira, de Carvalho, Paulo Victor Rodrigues
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London Springer London 01.02.2021
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Aerospace Technology and Astronautics
Automotive Engineering
Cognitive Psychology
Computer Science
Engineering
Experiments
Industrial and Organizational Psychology
Medicine/Public Health
Original Article
User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction
BPMN
Functional resonance
FRAM
Requirements elicitation
Complex systems
Resilience engineering
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Summary:Resilience engineering provides concepts and methods for assessing the ability of socio-technical systems to adjust their functioning before, during, or after changes or disturbances. As such, this field of study has great potential to contribute to software engineering—particularly for the requirements specification for information systems—that deals with variability, unpredictability, and adaptation in complex contexts. Despite software engineers’ efforts, the requirements phase is still challenging, especially in complex socio-technical systems. In these systems, the software must be more resilient and adaptable to deal with uncertain situations. Thus, this study aimed to investigate the contributions of resilience engineering to requirements engineering to identify software requirements for complex systems. Two experiments were performed with software professionals to produce requirements specifications in healthcare. The participants used information from the functional resonance analysis method (FRAM) compared to business process modeling notation (BPMN). Both experiments were supported by a systematic approach called MacKnight. This study indicates innovative strategies to gather resilient software requirements from FRAM models for complex systems.
ISSN:1435-5558
1435-5566
DOI:10.1007/s10111-019-00620-0