Study On User-Driven Software Development Method

Study on User-Driven Software Development MethodChao Li (Computer Software and Theory)Directed by Professor Mingshu LiNowadays, requirements of software systems are continuously expanding rapidly; software systems, instead of being attachments of hardware systems, are becoming more and more interweaved with people, organizations, and social systems; furthermore, systematic software reuse has been evoking a new wave of software development paradigm revolution. All these have centered Requirements Engineering (RE) one of the key parts of Software Engineering (SE) research and practice.Among the factors leading to software project failure, insufficient/invalid user input ranks first. This may partly due to the neglect of user participation in traditional RE approaches. Actually, how to carry out effective interaction and coordination between different users and between users and developers is far from trivial. Moreover, how to achieve consistent understanding of the problem domain and the software solution among stakeholders comes out to be another kernel issue largely ignored by traditional RE methods.The concept of User-Driven was proposed to address the user participation problem mentioned above. According to the concept of User-Driven, the paper delineates the key concepts and body of knowledge of a User-Driven RE methodology, User Engineering (UE), proposed by us. UE advocates User-Driven software development pattern that maps the software development activities into series of user definition procedures. To achieve this, developers must recognize and analyze users so as to perform RE activities with respect to the characteristics of identified users. In addition, users must be provided with workflow support, heuristic support with knowledge, and coordination support before they can drive the software development process.To operationalize the User-Driven software development pattern envisaged by UE, the paper constructs a Unified Development Method (UserUDM). The architecture of UserUDM consists of five layers, namely Role, Model, Process, Method, and Representation. Process layer lies in the heart of UserUDM, integrating the other four layers when instantiating the UserUDM processes in software development. UserUDM implements the key concept of UE into an operable process model, thus gives a practical way of applying User-Driven software development pattern into real business.The paper also demonstrates the usage of UserUDM by a large-scale case study in software quality management application domain...