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PublicationInforming on Climate-Friendly Novel Mobility Measures: Development of the Serious Game 'MiniLautern' and Analysis of Player Feedback( 2023)Climate change affects many aspects of our lives. To reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase quality of life, novel solutions need to be implemented. The digital transformation can support this direction. In this paper, we share experiences from the transformation of an urban district and show how digital solutions can support climate-friendly behavior. Our focus is on a Serious Game we developed, called 'MiniLautern', where players implement novel mobility solutions and have to address the concerns and needs of predefined stakeholders in order to maximize their score regarding stakeholders' happiness and positive environmental impact. We analyzed player feedback in order to understand better whether such a Serious Game is suitable for communicating the positive effects of novel mobility measures and researchers' efforts to address stakeholder concerns. Until now, the game MiniLautern has been completed by around 160 players, who have provided a total of 72 star ratings and answered about 20 questionnaires. So far, the reception of the game has been predominantly positive. Players like the core concept of matching novel mobility measures to stakeholder concerns, but would like to have expanded game mechanics, a larger solution space, and deeper interaction with the game.
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PublicationSmart City District Simulator - How we made a Virtual Smart City District Come Alive( 2022)
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PublicationOn the road towards a smart Urban district supported by a mock platform( 2021)The world is becoming more and more connected, which is also true for smart cities. The digital transformation is making rapid progress, and part of this are digital ecosystems, consisting of a platform and digital services that support several stakeholders with digital services. In the context of smart cities, we are currently developing a climate-neutral smart urban district and use digital solutions to address topics such as mobility, energy, smart home, and communication among the citizens involved. However, new ideas for services are challenging to invent, develop, and test in our situation, as this particular urban district is currently under construction. This is why we have developed a mock platform, which makes it much easier to evaluate new ideas fast, as qualities of a productive environment such as security or performance are not as highly relevant as an easy-to-use environment. We present details of our mock platform and our experiences in applying it to date. Such a solution is also beneficial for other practitioners and researchers in other smart cities and smart urban districts who are developing a digital ecosystem with new digital services.
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PublicationOn the design and conduction of virtual workshops: Experiences from going digital( 2021)Workshops (e.g., Innovation and Ideation workshops, Design Sprints, etc.) and virtual workshops play a major role in today's businesses. On the one hand, they provide a methodology for interdisciplinary collaboration, and on the other hand, they help teams solve problems by developing novel ideas, often for potentially new business opportunities. At the same time, workshop participants learn to apply various creativity techniques to solve complex problems holistically. These lessons learned support participants beyond a particular workshop. By being creative and working cooperatively, they experience a new way of working together that inspires future collaboration opportunities. In addition, workshops help to spread the thinking process behind creative and collaborative work and functions as an educational tool for corporate staff. Challenged by having had to transform our highly interactive workshops into the digital space, we have identified several practices to address these problems. We present our findings on overcoming obstacles of virtual online collaboration and discuss them from a metaeducational perspective.
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PublicationInnovation Workshop Documentation for Following Software Engineering Activities( 2020)[Context & motivation] Requirements engineering (RE) can be seen as creative problem solving (CPS), overlapping with user experience (UX) and design activities. Creative processes, such as innovation workshops (IWs), are often facilitated group activities. They provide an understanding of challenges and user needs, leading to increased software quality. A large number of results from IWs needs to be documented in a suitable manner for later use, as not all results can be followed up upon immediately. [Question/problem] With current means of IW documentation, it is hard to extract the required information (e.g., photo minutes), or they are inefficient to produce or digest (e.g., audio and video recordings, textual documentation). Documentation of only the results leads to the loss of any discussions, decisions, reasons, and discarded alternatives, as these are usually not written down during an IW. The interpretation of the documentation depends on the viewer's memory and understanding of the IW and the results, which is prone to misinterpretation and errors unless enriched with context information from the IW planning. [Principal ideas/results] We explored the limitations of IW documentation during a workshop with 29 experts from the usability and UX domain. Problems with using the results in later software engineering (SE), RE, and UX activities arise from misalignment between IW result documentation and activity requirements. The experts created a set of initial solution ideas, but no concrete solutions. [Contributions] We address the need for reasonable methods for documenting the results of IWs so that they can be used efficiently in later activities. The design and preliminary results of the expert workshop are presented. Furthermore, we discuss a research roadmap towards making targeted improvements to IW documentation by understanding subsequent activities.
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PublicationHow to gather requirements from the crowd with hackathons( 2020)[Context and motivation] Today's software systems become more and more complex, especially when we think about connected systems such as cyber-physical systems or digital ecosystems. Customers thereby demand flawless apps and have several needs in mind that such solutions should provide. If these are not fulfilled, they do not use the solution. In such connected environments, usually many different stakeholders exist that all have different requirements. [Question/ problem] In complex cyber-physical systems, the manifold requirements and possible solutions can overstrain requirements engineers and developers. What are ways to consider needs and requirements from different stakeholders? How can such input be used for requirements engineering? [Principal ideas/results] In order to gather ideas, issues and requirements from several different stakeholders, we propose to consider hackathons besides well-known and established requirements engineering methods. With these, one gets to know his stakeholders, get real needs from his stakeholders, and get early ideas and prototypical solutions. [Contribution] We share our experiences with two hackathons we performed in a research project that aims at developing a climate neutral city district with supporting digital services. We discuss opportunities and challenges and how results might be used for requirements engineering.
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PublicationConspiracy walls in requirements engineering( 2020)[Context and motivation] Existing requirements engineering (RE) methods and tools support practitioners. [Question/problem] However, with the increase in cross-disciplinary teams, the communication between team members requires a better understanding of role-specific interests and information needs. Moreover, selecting the right methods for gathering information based on actual needs is important and challenging as well. How can information needs be satisfied and the gap between as-is and to-be analysis be bridged? Other disciplines offer potential tools and methods that might be worthwhile to adapt. [Principal ideas/results] We envision the use of conspiracy walls- taken from the crime investigation domain-in RE. [Contribution] In this interactive session, we want to investigate the question of the applicability of the conspiracy wall method for data analysis in RE on the example of software products targeting citizens in rural areas. We provide pre-filled conspiracy walls for all participants of the CreaRE workshop and perform data analysis based on our exemplary evidence, leading to a joint discussion of the applicability of the method.
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