Value Stories: Putting Human Values into Requirements Engineering

Software systems can give rise to ethical issues, with human values such as privacy, autonomy and responsibility at their heart. Such issues often do not become apparent until software has been put to use, and are left to be dealt with after harm has been done. However, these ethical issues are influenced by decisions made during design. A range of approaches to technology design aims to consider ethical issues and their underlying values during design, when there is more room to shape a technology. These values-oriented approaches guide designers in identifying and analyzing value issues with technology, but do not focus on deriving requirements from identified issues. As a result, the knowledge that can be gained from values-oriented methods does not find its way into requirements engineering processes. To address these challenges, we present a method to extract values and related elements obtained through existing value elicitation techniques, and to document these elements in a format that is amenable to use in further requirements engineering activities. We present a case study as a proof of concept.