An Improved Method for Socio-Technical Process Design – the Development of Requirements in the Case of Pharmacy Systems

Modeling social-technical systems' work processes as a basis for requirements engineering is a challenging issue. One of the most important requirements for enhancing a socio-technical system for an organization is that system analysts know and understand how the system supports the company's work processes.
Formal approaches have a difficult time capturing the scope and complexity of diverse organizations with social and technological components. Informal techniques, on the other hand, lack the precision required to inform the software design and development process or enable automated analysis. In this research, the concept of SeeMe (a semi-structured socio-technical modeling method) is revisited. SeeMe models sociotechnical systems as a representation of contingency, explicit incompleteness, and multiplicity of perspectives.
In this thesis, SeeMe is used as a well-defined semantics for representing sequences of activities. In addition, requirements analysts have investigated the practice of modeling stakeholder objectives and motivations behind systems using organizational modeling frameworks such as i* to deal with the rapidly increasing complexity of socio-technical systems. The research area of this thesis would be the optimization of requirements engineering for a socio-technical systems by applying the process modeling notations. More specifically, the thesis focuses on socio-technical, process-based requirements specification. The participating research fields and scope of this thesis examines the intersection of three of the following areas:
  •  socio-technical systems,
  •  process modeling,
  •  and requirements engineering.
To support this social concept, an extended SeeMe (SeeMe*) is presented that supports modeling of the agent-oriented paradigm of the i* framework, and allows us to capture agent properties such as intentionality, autonomy, sociality, contingent identity and boundaries, strategic reflectivity, and rational self-interest. Afterwards, SeeMe* is applied in a pharmacy case study to improve its work process and elicit the social and technical requirements. The application of SeeMe* enables analysts to systematically generate the specifications of requirements. An expert-workshop was also conducted to evaluate the application and usefulness of this method and validate the research findings.

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