Agile with Animals: Towards a Development Method

Abstract

The advance of modern technologies opens new exciting opportunities for computer-based systems for animals. There is an explosion of products and gadgets for animals, such as wellness monitoring applications (e.g., FitBark and PetPace), automatic food dispensers, digital enrichment, and many more. The emerging discipline of Animal-Computer Interaction marks a new era in the development for non-human users, stressing a user-centric approach.As most available elicitation techniques in RE are verbal and little reusable requirements data yet exists, this calls for developing new approaches which can be adapted to non-human users. This paper takes a step in this direction by proposing a development model which incorporates iterative prototyping, animal welfare as a central value, and a direct involvement of animal experts at all stages of the development process.