The human factor: the influence of personality, emotions, culture and other ’soft elements’ on Requirements Engineering/Software Architecture/Software Design

There has been considerable interest in impact of personality on programmers and testers. Recently, there has been considerable interest in the social and cultural backgrounds of software designers, and how it influences the way that they design software that may ultimately be used by people with very different social and cultural backgrounds. This project will investigate the effects of various "human factors" such as personality, gender, age, emotions, accessibility, usability and culture - both of engineers themselves, and stakeholders affected by the software they build - on requirements engineering and/or software design. Better understanding these influences in RE and/or SD domains will help to better support requirements engineers and designers to build software that meets the needs of stakeholders, whatever their backgrounds.

This project will commence with an SLR of studies to date, design and run a set of experiments or other empirical studies (possibly including qualitative studies) to gauge impact of these traits on representative RA and/or SD activities. We will investigate adding emotion and other human reactions to various design diagrams e.g. UML, ADLs and the like, to better support meeting these human-centric issues during software development. The approach will include: identifying range of affective computing needs esp emotional reactions to software including SLR on existing approaches; augmenting e.g. users stories, UML diagrams etc with these; prototype tool and design critics to support; generating tests from augmented human-centric requirements models; and evaluation of the approach with end users.