54 PART | II ITS users
stakeholders’ management, users’ involvement, social and organizational issues
identification, and design for context. The issue concerning users’ experiences
will be discussed in subsequent chapter.
4.5 Potential solutions for ITS requirements elicitation
The role of requirements elicitation in the development of ITS is vital and if
they are not collected correctly from the beginning they will probably lead to a
failure (Tsumaki & Tamai, 2006). The main reason for this is that uncaptured
requirements and errors are difficult to fix at the later development stages (Sadiq,
Ghafir, & Shahid, 2009). The requirements elicitation methods that are usually
employed in ITS, collect the requirements from various external sources rather
than from the actual end-users and thus fail to capture probably the most impor-
tant application context, which is the user context. The resulting requirements
do not fulfill users’ expectations (Brazile, Swigger, Harrington, Harrington, &
Peng, 2002). Modern requirement elicitation methodologies extend the concept
of “application context” to include the user, computing and physical context of
the ITS, and adapt the system development process to take advantage of this
extended context notion from the very first stage. They involve real users in the
requirement elicitation process and consider all possible context types in order
to collect high-quality requirements that identify user needs.
4.6 Contextual, social, and dynamic requirements elicitation
In addition to the early engagement of users in the requirements elicitation pro-
cess and the consideration of the various application contexts, modern require-
ment elicitation methodologies support the continuous evolution of requirements
in terms of highly complex and dynamic problems such as these occurring in
many ITS. The focus of these methodologies shifts from the fixed requirements
to requirements that are dynamic in nature and evolve as the development pro-
gresses, or as the system begins to operate. These methodologies also assume
the social aspect of requirements that emanate from user groups and organiza-
tions rather than individuals. This type of information is closely dependent on
the activities and formation of the organization that employs or supports the ITS.
Since context is a driving force in the formation of requirements and the
development of ITS, context awareness must be an intrinsic part of ITS devel-
opment. The ITS designers and developers must consider the context in which
the ITS will operate, including the environmental parameters, the expected user
behavior, and the interaction of users with the environment in various scenarios,
in order to better address the requirements collected in the requirement elicitation
phase at later phases. ITS users are the actors and their actions are an integral part
of the hosting environment, so it is important to analyze and understand context
in order to provide the proper services (Winograd, Flores, & Flores, 1986). The
requirements elicitation techniques, such as those based on the cultural-historical