The Social Requirements Engineering (SRE) Approach to Developing a Large-scale PersonalApproach to Developing a Large scale Personal

Learning Environment Infrastructure

Effie Lai-Chong Law1, Arunangsu Chatterjee1, Dominik Renzel2 and Ralf Klamma2

1Department of Computer Science, University of Leicester, UK2Chair of Computer Science 5 - Information Systems, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

EC-TEL 2012, Saarbrücken, GermanySeptember 21, 2012

© www.role-project.eu

This work by the above authors is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.

Personal Learning Environments (PLE)

“a pedagogy-driven infrastructure that facilitates learners to integrate distributed contents services tools and contactsintegrate distributed contents, services, tools and contacts based on personal goals and preferences, thereby enabling them to control their own learning and to connect different glearning contexts with the support of communities”

Motivation

Which tools should II know which tools mylearners would needWhich tools should I

develop to createmost impact?

learners would need...But I can‘t develop!

Motivation

Users (many) high potential to elicit requirements from domain knowledge [Hipp86] usually not acquainted with formal specs developer tools & tech jargon usually not acquainted with formal specs, developer tools & tech jargon need intuitive means for stating community-specific requirements dependent on developers realizing their requirements

Developers (few) often not acquainted with domain knowledge and community jargon use formal specs tools & jargon for reasons of effectiveness & efficiency use formal specs, tools & jargon for reasons of effectiveness & efficiency used to integration between development tools interested in requirements prioritization to maximize outcome

Needed: model & software to support negotiation processROLE Social Requirements Engineering (SRE)ROLE Social Requirements Engineering (SRE)ROLE Requirements Bazaar

Theoretical Premises

Transcriptivity Theory (Jäger, 2002) describing the operational semantics

ATLAS (Architecture for Transcription, Localization, and Addressing Systems) - scalable and interoperable repositoriesAddressing Systems) - , scalable and interoperable repositories on top of databases support communities by web service technologies (Jarke and Klamma, 2006)

Communities of Practice (CoP) (Wenger, 1998)

Actor-network-theory (ANT) (Latour 1999)

Details available via ROLE website > Results > Deliverables > Wp1 deliverablesdeliverables

The ROLE SRE Approach – Support for the Long Tail

No Mainstream Web 2.0 RE!“O ll T N“ i h “Overall Top-N“: naive approach

Needs of specialized CoPs neglectedI ti Kill ( l l ) Innovation Killer (clones only)

Rather Long-Tail RE “Community-Aware Top-N“ Special support for niche CoPs High specialization, but high innovation

ROLE Social Requirements Engineering (SRE) – i* SR

ROLE Requirements Bazaar – Required Features

ROLE Requirements Bazaar – Initial Mockup

ROLE Requirements Bazaar – Early Prototypes

Quantitative assistance mechanisms during negotiation

Hybrid ranking mechanism

Web-based requirements elicitation form

Requirements review

Lessons Learned from Early Prototype Evaluations

Evaluations in 2 workshops in 2011 Developers & pedagogical experts (N~20) Early-stage TEL researchers (N~20)

Issues Identified Culture & language diversity Lack of common understanding about PLEs

I d t i ti Inadequate communication Distinction between infrastructure and widgets requirements LurkingLurking

Resolutions Proposed Documentation for improving understanding of PLE Documentation for improving understanding of PLE Easy-to-use templates for requirements elicitation Mandatory voting Prioritisation model

Intuitive Means for Requirements Elicitation

C i lik t tiComic-like annotationson screenshots/Storytelling

Web 2.0 feedback tools: uservoice.com getsatisfaction.comgetsatisfaction.com

ROLE Requirements Bazaar – Current Prototype

ROLE Requirements Bazaar –Community-aware Requirements Prioritization

Community-dependentrequirements ranking lists

Community-dependentrequirements ranking lists

Factors influencingFactors influencingrequirements rankingrequirements ranking

User-controlled weightingof ranking factors

User-controlled weightingof ranking factorsof ranking factorsof ranking factors

Useful Sources for Requirements Ranking

User-to-Service Communication CoP-aware usage statistics Identification of successful CoP services Identification of CoP service usage patterns

User to User Communication User-to-User Communication CoP-aware Social Network Analysis Identification of influential CoP membersde ca o o ue a Co e be s Identification of CoP member interaction patterns

+

ROLE Requirements Bazaar –Requirements Ranking Infrastructure

URA = User Rating Analysis (baseline)URA = User Rating Analysis (baseline)URA = User Rating Analysis (baseline)UMA = User Monitoring AnalysisURA = User Rating Analysis (baseline)UMA = User Monitoring Analysis

Integration of the Bazaar with external services

Lessons Learned

Lack of common understanding and awareness about PLEs. Developers/teachers/researchers acting as “surrogate customer”

which is a potential problemwhich is a potential problem Inadequate communication among “end-users” and developers

around proposed requirementsaround proposed requirements Cultural diversity and language barrier – Chinese, German and

English View Separation important as demonstrated earlier

Expose relevant requirements as per users context Ensure easily configurable views

Devise mechanism to counter ‘Cold Start’ problems Mandatory voting Mandatory voting Reward mechanism in terms of visible reputation scores or badges

Future Improvements

E f t ib ti Ease of contribution Create templates that users can edit rather than forcing them to

start from scratch Allow users to enter requirements in their preferred language Integrate with development infrastructure (e.g JIRA) for enhanced

t bilittraceability Prioritisation model

Attempt of extract rationales behind ratings Attempt of extract rationales behind ratings Utilise SNA and Monitoring data to assist decision support via a

RE dashboard Requirements dashboard

Users able to view their own activity View community activity