GTM research on Critical Requirements Engineering in Practice to be published in the prestigious IEEE Software magazine.

Image: pixabay by geralt

A member of the GTM, Dr. Leticia Duboc, and her collaborators from the University of Toronto (Canada) had a paper accepted in the prestigious IEEE Software magazine, on a special edition on Software Engineering in Society.

While Software systems have an enormous potential for improving human lives, they can also cause many maladies. We have recently seen examples that vary from radicalizing voters, to the erosion of privacy, to support emission test cheating, to the energy impact of bitcoin mining. Such effects raise serious concerns regarding ethics, power relationships in the design of software systems, the politics of engaging stakeholders, and the role of human and social values in software engineering. The researchers demonstrate how Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH) can be used in the context of Requirements Engineering to gain a critical awareness of the power and politics in software development, helping engineers to question their choices and more fairly represent the concerns of those at risk of marginalization. The technique has been applied to to the HomeSound project, which aims at supporting elderly people living at home through a Wireless Acoustic Sensor Network that detects unusual sounds that might indicate possible changes in routine, accidents or mishaps.

The reference of the paper is:

• Leticia Duboc; Curstis McCord; Christopher Becker C; Istiaque Ahmed;  “Critical Requirements Engineering in Practice “ IEEE Software (accepted August 2019; in press).

with abstract:

Software have a great potential to for improving human lives. It can also enable all sorts of maladies, raising issues of ethics, power, politics, and human and social values. The bet opportunity to deal with such issues during software development is within Requirements Engineering (RE). Yet, many RE frameworks lack the concepts to address lack the concepts to address politics, morality, aesthetics, and beliefs. In this paper, we should how Critical System Heuristics (CSH) can be used for structuring early explorations of requirements, providing a framework for developing a reflective understanding for justifying the project and system scope.