Requirements analysis for customizable software: a goals-skills-preferences framework

Abstract

Software customization has been argued to benefit both the productivity of software engineers and end users. However, most customization methods rely on specialists to manually tweak individual applications for a specific user group. Existing software development methods also fail to acknowledge the importance of different kinds of user skills and preferences and how these might be incorporated into a customizable software design. We propose a framework for performing requirements analysis on user goals, skills, and preferences in order to generate a customizable software design. We illustrate our methodology with an email system and review an on-going case study involving users with traumatic brain injury.