Evolving Requirements in Socio-Technical Systems: Concepts and Practice

Changes in requirements are inevitable in the context of sociotechnical systems (STS) that involve human organizations with their rules, as well as individuals and software systems. In these complex systems need for changes may emerge once software components come into operation, due to undesirable behavior of the STS, or due to variations in organization rules, laws, resources and STS's components themselves. This leads to a problem of continuous analysis of evolving requirements in a traceable way. Our work is motivated by experience in a real project in the health-care domain, and in analysis practices based on participatory design methods (scenarios and personas) and on techniques for law-compliant requirements analysis. We revisit this experience and generalize it into a novel framework that provides concepts and practices to support an evolutionary and "participatory" process for requirements evolution in STS.

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