Transcript Towards Understanding Requirements for eScience

Towards Understanding Requirements for
eScience: the eDiaMoND case study
Marina Jirotka, Rob Procter, Chris Hinds, Catelijne
Coopmans, James Soutter and Sharon LLoyd
Requirements and eScience
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eScience and system development
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eScience another domain for technological development
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Previous studies of why system development projects fail
Requirements activities
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Eliciting, analysing and specifying functional and non-functional requirements
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Development process and managing requirements exercises
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Managing conflict and trade offs
Range of requirements issues
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Security, visualisation of information, data storage management and retrieval, data
mining…..
Context of work attempting to support - To determine what properties a system
should have to succeed in the environment in which it will be used
Who needs Requirements?
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eScience is complex challenging domain
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Supporting large scale collaboration
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Understanding interdisciplinary work
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Context of scientific work, how data generated, used and shared
Professional expertise
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Understanding different types of knowledge
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Knowledge in use, not only as classifications
Range of participants/stakeholders involved
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Biologists, chemists, health clinicians, physicists, zoologists, etc
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Academic, industrial, scientific research communities
Introduction to e-DiaMoND
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£4.1m budget funded through EPSRC/DTI and IBM SUR grant
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2 year project started December 2002
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Academic and commercial collaborators over 12 sites
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Deliver prototype to support breast screening in UK
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Large distributed database of annotated mammograms
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Applications will be developed for:
• Teaching and education
• Screening/diagnosis
• Epidemiology
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Ambitious, flagship project, with short time-scales
eDiaMoND Project Team
Guys
Hospital
(GUY)
St. Georges Hospital
(GEO)
Ardmillan
Churchill
Hospital
(CHU)
Oxford University
Context of Requirements Capture
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Challenging complex domain
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Highly volatile - social and organisational issues
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Critical - dealing with people’s health care
Range of participants/stakeholders involved
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Doctors, nurses, admin, researchers, geneticists, epidemiologists,
radiologists, radiographers….
Different stakeholders on project, academic, industrial, clinical
Professional medical expertise
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Understanding knowledge
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Tacit understanding and apprenticeship
UK Breast Screening – Today
Paper
Film
Began in 1988
Women 50-64
Screened
Every 3 Years
1 View/Breast
1,300,000 - Screened in 2001-02
65,000 - Recalled for Assessment
8,545 – Cancers detected
300 - Lives per year Saved
~100 Breast
Screening
Programmes
- Scotland
- Wales
- Northern Ireland
- England
230 - Radiologists (Double Reading)
Statistics from NHS Cancer Screening web site
UK Breast Screening – Challenges
Digital
Digital
2,000,000 - Screened every Year
120,000 - Recalled for Assessment
10,000 - Cancers
1,250 - Lives Saved
230 - Radiologists (Double Reading)
50% - Workload Increase
Women 50-70
Screened
Every 3 Years
2 Views/Breast
+ Demographic
Increase
~100 Breast
Screening
Programmes
- Scotland
- Wales
- N Ireland
- England
Areas of Technological Interest
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Non digital films and light boxes - transition to digital
Non standard reporting systems - full integration
Manual movement of data - Grid
Reporting difficult - Database and Grid
Training through mentoring - Computer based training via Grid
Localised epidemiological studies - Database and Grid
CADe not used - enabled by Grid and Digital Reading
QuickTime™ and a
DV - NTSC decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Towards Practice-Centred Requirements Analysis
Iterative Requirements
Process
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Understanding of work practices
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elicitation and
verification
Managing conflict between different stakeholders
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interviews, fieldwork and video analysis, design workshops,
prototyping, user acceptance
design workshops, user participation, trade off concerns of technical
partners and other stakeholders, user acceptance and expectations
Understanding of transition from user to system requirements
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analysis and verification
communication and expression of requirements, ethnographers and
developers, organisational constraints, hierarchy of requirements,
modelling, prioritisation, quasi-naturalistic evaluation of prototypes,
blueprints, user acceptance
specification and
verification
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Understanding of local and organisational
concerns
Sharing Data within BSU
Letters
X-Rays, Notes, Screening forms
Light Boxes
High volume reading
Some portable
machines
Manual hanging
Administratively intense
Notes, Screening forms
Patient Folders
Radiology reporting
systems
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Visibility and
accountability of
work
transformed
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Practical ethical
action - safety
culture
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Flexible role
based access
structure
Sharing Data Across BSUs
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Allows rapid movement of mammograms and patient related data
between BSUs
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Distributed reading - maximising use of scarce skills
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Double reading, professional judgement and trust
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Need to follow case from beginning to end
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Concern over automated allocation of cases to radiologists
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Useful in symptomatic clinics
Sharing Data Across Disciplines
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Value of database to epidemiologists
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Orient to ethical concerns
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Impact on eDiaMoND project
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Acquiring information to improve healthcare for public interest vs
protecting citizens from unscrupulous use of personal data
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Anonymisation, consent and confidentiality
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Epidemiologists cannot specify complete data requirements
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Research work and scientific publications
Lessons Learned
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Without understanding the details and context of clinicians’ work we risk
building systems that are not fit for purpose
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eHealth
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Focussing on work practices, organisational issues…
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complex collaborative domain
diverse range of professional expertise
volatile organisational issues
Understanding of work flow, collaborative practices and everyday work of clinicians
Techniques to inform design of eScience technologies
Transforming the eScience vision of sharing data
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We must be sensitive to the ways in which skills such as reading mammograms
and researching into causes of breast cancer are developed and maintained and
how these will be transformed by eScience technology
Lessons Learned 2
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Don’t ignore previous research in areas such as CSCW regarding
global collaboration and virtual organisations
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New issues in eScience
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Scale and expertise needed for global collaboration - CSCW
Practical implications from studies of science and scientific knowledge SSK
Development models and requirements for eScience -RE