Child's play: using techniques developed to elicit requirements from children with adults

Abstract

Tools and techniques for requirements elicitation ure generally unsuitable for use with children and for innovative and futuristic developments. Using case studies, this paper explores practical methods to get requirements for future technologies from children. Techniques such as scenurio building, roleplaying and stog,boarding proved successflrl in involving children in the requirements process and stimulating innovation. The paper looks ut how these methods can be udopted to take u more jundumentul approach to requirements elicitation fijf;,r adults.These techniques help requirements engineers face the difJicult tusk of getting system requirements from users of whatever age, ability or background. They also enable requirements engineers to anticipate some of the future changes that might occur before or as a consequence of the installation of a new system. The lack of specialist notation was found to promote communication throughout the analysis and design process and gives the designers a context in which to design.

Using Design Thinking to Break Social Barriers: an Experience Report with Former Inmates

“…The work "Child's play: using techniques developed to elicit requirements from children with adults" by Millard et al 36 uses case studies to elicit requirements that are the basis for future development of technologies for children and the goal of their study is to prove that these tools can be used to obtain requirements from adults. The authors use the techniques of scenarios, roleplaying, and storyboarding for requirements elicitation and point out that one of the downsides is the production of impractical scenarios.…”

Comicboarding

“…[10] had children "play out the parts of characters [of comic strip characters] on screen", using the characters to create a shared context. The dialogue was used to inform design.…”

Contextual risk analysis for interview design

“…Other tactics common in social sciences include free listening, card sorts, triad tests and paired comparisons [28]. Such tactics provide analysts and participants with more means of communicating socio-technical issues [24]. In unstructured interviews, there is no pre-defined agenda, and interviewers may explore a range of issues with stakeholders.…”

“…The research environments in this and related domains have "traditionally focused on tools and techniques to be used on adult users involved in large scale, office based systems development. The research has rarely focused on educational, entertainment, innovative and personal applications" [24]. The CFO system provides an interesting research environment because it allows us to study a wide range of contexts.…”