Requirement Evolution

Requirement Evolution

My flow of blogs was delayed by another management essay – this time on consultancy and entrepreneurs – but the third-year project still moves on. Having settled more firmly on the intended outcome of my project, I decided it was time to revisit the purpose of the project.

Two reasons:
1) In all third-year projects, a second examiner is appointed. It is typical for this examiner to come from a different grouping in the lab and provides the challenge of expressing clearly the intended work to someone unfamiliar with the academic theory but nonetheless capable of critical evaluation.

2) Any experiment must reach a conclusion, which is based on results and results require some method of evaluation. In this instance, there must be some method to evaluate and judge the level of success of any prototype.

This began to make me think about the wider justifications and the academic literature which backs this idea. More specifically, I need to think about how to write this in a logical flow. As mentioned previously, I intend to issue a questionnaire and have been forming one that will hopefully provide specifics on the perceived weaknesses of other software on the market. This survey will give justification by way of first-hand user experience, but will not provide understanding behind why users prefer one feature over another. This is the purpose of the literature review.

Having reached the stage of writing the literature review, I do not think that the stage has been reached where new requirements can be discarded and have found myself to be always thinking. There was a program on BBC Three – Kara Tointon: Don’t Call Me Stupid (Available until the 4th December in the UK), which follows an actress and her handling her dyslexia. Kara had been diagnosed young, but she only recently took the time to revisit the implications in her daily life and improve handling of it.

Being a soap actress is quite a demanding job in the respect of learning a script due to the time constraints involved. The condition can be expressed as a weakness in short-term memory and one of the techniques presented to Kara for dealing with this involved movement and post-it notes. By placing notes which related to the script on various items in a room, Kara was able to improve the time taken to learn scripts. One of my requirements will be to factor this idea of movement into application. There is already apresentation editor which makes good use of camera rotation around a canvas called Prezi. I feel the idea is ripe for expansion. The greater point here is that even though the technique is intended as a solution for someone with a learning difference, it should be useful to a wider range of the population. I have lofty hopes for the prototype.