Modelling Emotional Requirements

The way people feel about a technology can determine whether the technology is embraced or rejected by its intended users. People’s feelings and emotions are particularly important for uptake of socio-technical systems involving social behaviour. For example, a photo sharing web application will not be used if people do not feel engaged or in-touch with their friends and family during use. Considering the feelings of the intended users of a system can uncover new requirements, leading to an improved and more accepted system. We contend that requirements engineering, in developing systems for the new social age, needs modified lightweight practices. In this paper, we propose adapting a requirements engineering methodology to include emotion modelling for socio-technical systems. We extend a set of existing agent oriented lightweight models to consider emotions, describe the process for modelling, and demonstrate both models and process in an example of personal alarm systems for older adults.