Padre: a Participatory Design Requirement Engineering System

All important features, such as usability, quality, or efficiency of a product, are determined early on in the design process by the extent to which design requirements are captured and understood. Traditionally, however, those most effected by design decisions, such as users, have been left out of the design process in general and the requirement gathering in particular. Although restricted exclusively to computer system design, recently a new approach, called Participatory Design, has grown out of the realization that traditional system design fails “to do things that both managers and users expect them to.” With Participatory Design, the field of Requirement Engineering encompassing acquiring, refining, and checking clients’ needs for computer systems has come into focus. Recognizing that the problems addressed by Participatory Design are problems shared with design at large, we set ourselves the goal of applying existing Requirement Engineering methods to and develop new ones for design in general. In this paper, we present PADRE, a new Participatory Design Requirement Engineering intelligent agent-based system. Its scope is requirement elicitation, specification and validation using recognized, as well as new cognitive communication tools. PADRE takes as input an initial, informal requirement specification for a design object, as well as an ontology of the application domain, and generates a complete, unambiguous, consistent, and implementable requirement specification, as well as a tree representing the design process. It does so by “mentally” walking the designer and the user agents through the design process while stepwise refining specifications. In order to assist and partially automate the walk-through, we have developed a domain independent elicitation tool, called WALT. A session with WALT results in the generation of a tree structure representing various specification refinement levels and processes, as well as a tree representing the various design decisions made by the designer agent during the session. PADRE is a participatory design system that can be used in any application domain. This sets it apart from most of the existing participatory design methods and tools. PADRE: A PARTICIPATORY DESIGN REQUIREMENT ENGINEERING SYSTEM 3