The role of deferred requirements in a longitudinal study of emailing

Our group has taken a clinical approach to doing requirements engineering for a specific domain: delivering email tools to the cognitively impaired population. The clinical view suggests a process that first gathers an individual's goals, assesses the individual's abilities, delivers a tailored system, and finally, monitors usage over time to look for adaptation needs. One concept that has arisen from our project is the notion of a deferred requirement (or deferred goal). Professional clinicians ask an individual to think broadly of the goals they have, and think about not only goals that are achievable today, but ones that might be striven for and become achieved in the future. We discuss this idea of deferred requirements in terms of a longitudinal study working with nine participants over a two year period. We also report on initial attempts to build automated tools around deferred requirements, monitoring, and system adaptation.