Psychologically-Driven Requirements Engineering: A Case Study in Depression Care

Abstract

Developing software that is accepted by its intended users can be a challenge. It is not only important to facilitate peoples tasks or achieve their functional goals, but also such technology has to meet their values, satisfy their expectations, and encourage them to accept and trust the software. In this paper, we propose a novel psychologically-driven requirements engineering approach that captures and models stakeholders personal values, motivations and emotions. Using a grounded theory approach, we analyze information about stakeholders and the domain, model the results using psychologically-driven goal models, which facilitate the communication with stakeholders, and then we use this model as a basis for engineering concrete requirements. In conjunction with a team of experts on depression care, we evaluated our approach on an application for early diagnosis of depression. Results from our evaluation showed that the consideration of emotions, values, and motivations lead to improved outcomes, and were strongly endorsed by various stakeholders, including users, general practitioners, and psychologists.