Promoting software quality through a human, social and organisational requirements elicitation process

Abstract

Human, social and organisational (HSO) factors play a decisive role in software development in terms of determining functional and non-functional characteristics of software products. The significance of these factors is underlined by the need to produce applications that fit nicely in a working setting, supporting the working procedures followed and promoting users' content and productivity. In this context, a new requirements elicitation process is proposed, a part of which utilises a short-scale ethnography analysis. The process introduces specific steps for recording HSO factors based on certain software quality characteristics that are treated as principal components for conducting requirements identification. The output of the process is the HSO document, which can be used in conjunction with the classic requirements document to identify structural and functional aspects of the system.