Critical Requirements Engineering in Practice
This addresses the need for more robust ethical and value-aware frameworks in Requirements Engineering, particularly for systems impacting vulnerable groups like the elderly, though it is incremental as it combines existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of navigating implicit values in software design by proposing a framework, Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH), integrated with Requirements Engineering techniques, and demonstrates its application in a case study on a system for elderly safety, showing how it can reveal underlying value-judgements.
The design of software systems inevitably enacts normative boundaries around the site of intervention. These boundaries are, in part, a reflection of the values, ethics, power, and politics of the situation and the process of design itself. This paper argues that Requirements Engineering (RE) require more robust frameworks and techniques to navigate the values implicit in systems design work. To this end, we present the findings from a case of action research where we employed Critical Systems Heuristics (CSH), a framework from Critical Systems Thinking (CST) during requirements gathering for Homesound, a system to safeguard elderly people living alone while protecting their autonomy. We use categories from CSH to inform expert interviews and reflection, showing how CSH can be simply combined with RE techniques (such as the Volere template) to explore and reveal the value-judgements underlying requirements.