Abstract
Incomplete or inefficient elicitation, comprehension and transmission of client requirements are all sources of information system (IS) failure rates. Requirements may be missed, misunderstood or miscommunicated for the lack of a single, consistent, informing theory. Structured requirements elicitations techniques impose time delays. Cursory techniques can fail to reach any mutual understanding with the stakeholder. Formal methods can fail to cope with non-functional requirements and coder-oriented methods can put the cart before the horse, delivering something other than required. Agile methods can deliver hasty product, cobbled to meet first-cut requirements, perhaps justified by a notion that users cannot reach stable conclusions.
This chapter introduces the Activity Theoretic Software Architecture (ATSA) method (formerly known under the working title ‘5S’), which deploys Activity Theory (AT) as it’s informing theoretical framework to address complex human ‘doings’ in a non-burdensome way, to elicit requirements and generate feasible specifications with some confidence as to fidelity and consensual agreement.
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Brown, R.B.K., Piper, I.C. (2013). What Users Do: SA&D with the ATSA Method. In: Pooley, R., Coady, J., Schneider, C., Linger, H., Barry, C., Lang, M. (eds) Information Systems Development. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4951-5_25
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4951-5_25
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