The Benefit of Ambiguity in Understanding Goals in Requirements Modelling

Abstract

This paper examines the benefit of ambiguity in describing goals in requirements modelling for the design of socio-technical systems using concepts from Agent-Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE) and ethnographic and cultural probe methods from Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The authors’ aim of their research is to create technologies that support more flexible and meaningful social interactions, by combining best practice in software engineering with ethnographic techniques to model complex social interactions from their socially oriented life for the purposes of building rich socio-technological systems. Currently social needs are modelled as coordinative and collaborative goals; however the domestic space surfaces a range of purely communicative activities, which are not calculated to serve any external productive purpose (i.e., it is communication often for the sake of pleasure).The authors use a holistic approach to eliciting, analyzing, and modelling socially-oriented requirements by combining a particular form of ethnographic technique, cultural probes, with Agent Oriented Software Engineering notations to model these requirements. This paper focuses on examining the value of maintaining ambiguity in the process of elicitation and analysis through the use of empirically informed quality goals attached to functional goals. The authors demonstrate the benefit of articulating a quality goal without turning it into a functional goal. Their study shows that quality goals kept at a high level of abstraction, ambiguous and open for conversations through the modelling process add richness to goal models, and communicate quality attributes of the interaction being modelled to the design phase, where this ambiguity is regarded as a resource for design.