User requirements and preferences for ITS Chapter | 4 53Although traditional requirements’ elicitation methods can deal with the
functional aspects of requirements and the recording of domain knowledge, they
can hardly capture the social and organizational system aspects. Organizational
requirements can be captured when the emphasis is given on the social context
of the system instead of its technical, procedural, or administrative aspects. The
analysis of the organization’s power structure, the various roles and responsi-
bilities, the values and ethics that hold and several autonomy and control issues
can help the organization requirements’ elicitation (Avison & Wood-Harper,
1986 ). Such requirements are difficult to observe or articulate because they are
deeply embedded in the structure and policies of the organization (McGrath &
Uden, 2000).
The majority of requirement elicitation techniques fail to properly address
the critical social (people-related) and organizational aspects of the system.
The existing models do not capture “regularly-patterned” human activity
(Probert, 1999) and new methodologies and tools are needed to support highly
complex and dynamic situations that lead to evolving requirements. The meth-
ods must shift from fixed requirements to more dynamic ones; must consider
the subjectivity of information provided by humans and be aware that the amal-
gam of individual, group and organizational needs is significantly different
from other types of objective (e.g., physical) information. Social information is
closely related to the form and activities of the organization (McGrath & Uden,
2000 ).
According to Hong, Chiu, & Shen (2005) “The notion of context should be
extended to different categories: computing contexts, user contexts, and physi-
cal contexts.” Since new means of interaction are established, the ITS appli-
cation context becomes an essential part of activities carried out by the user
with the help of the system. Traditional software design tools and methods are
inadequate to support the implementation of context-aware applications and
thus introduce the need for novel requirement elicitation techniques that also
consider the system context. The design of contextual requirements must also
consider the conflicting requirements coming from the various stakeholders.
Finally, requirements elicitation must put focus on the user experience,
especially in the case of autonomous vehicles. There exist only a few stud-
ies that examine user experience expectations from autonomous vehicle users
(Litman, 2017). In this case, the user experience (UX) attempts to get a deep
understanding of user needs and values, as well as user abilities and limitations.
Since the success of the requirement elicitation process strongly depends on
the selected technique, best practices in UX requirements elicitation focus on
improving the quality of user’s interaction with the system, and on optimizing
users’ perceptions of the system and its related services (Hickey & Davis, 2003).
It is important to address many of the above problems when selecting the
method to use. A new approach to elicit all types of ITS requirements is needed
in order to overcome all the above limitations. The remaining sections of this
chapter briefly propose an approach that can tackle all the above issues—multiple