Paper Info
Title
Fostering user-developer collaboration with infrastructure probes
Abstract
In this paper we present a new variation of cultural probes, called Infrastructure Probes (IP). IPs can be seen as an additional ethnographic method to get a deeper understanding of the user's working context and thus help to improve the collaboration between users and developers regarding requirements elicitation. They consist of a screenshot tool, a digital camera, Post-it's, forms, an IT diary and a writing pad, allowing end users to observe and document their use of the IT infrastructure in question with special emphasis on problematic situations. The results of a first evaluation of the concept show that IPs could supplement traditional ethnographic methods to give researchers as well as software engineers a deeper insight into the working habits of users, but could also be a means for users to document and exchange technology usages. For a reflection of the IP concept we conducted feedback workshops together with the participants of the evaluation. The feedback resulted in an improved version which is currently already under evaluation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1145/1370114.1370126
CHASE
Keywords
Field
DocType
working habit,ip concept,working context,deeper insight,infrastructure probe,user-developer collaboration,deeper understanding,it diary,it infrastructure,traditional ethnographic method,concept show,additional ethnographic method,software design,requirement engineering,requirements engineering,requirements elicitation,software engineering,field research
World Wide Web,Systems engineering,End user,Computer science,Requirements engineering,Requirements elicitation,Software,Information technology management,Field research
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
10
0.86
13
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christian Dörner1566.51
Jan Hess213413.29
Volkmar Pipek380675.64