Social Analysis in the Requirements Engineering Process: From Ethnography to Method

Over a number of years, we have been involved in investigations into using workplace observation to inform requirements for complex systems. This paper discusses how our work has evolved from ethnography with prototyping, through presentation of ethnographic fieldwork, to developing a method for social analysis that has been derived from our experience of applying ethnographic techniques. We discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each of these approaches with a particular focus on our most recent work in developing the Coherence method. This method is based on a fusion of viewpoint-oriented and ethnographic approaches to requirements engineering and uses an industry-standard notation (UML) to represent knowledge of work. We use a common example of an air traffic control system to illustrate each approach.