Mennig, Patrick

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  • Publication
    Innovation Workshop Documentation for Following Software Engineering Activities
    ( 2020)
    Mennig, Patrick
    ;
    Nass, Claudia
    [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.
  • Publication
    Conspiracy walls in requirements engineering
    ( 2020)
    Hess, Anne
    ;
    Mennig, Patrick
    ;
    Bartels, Nedo
    [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.
  • Publication
    How to gather requirements from the crowd with hackathons
    ( 2020)
    Mennig, Patrick
    ;
    Elberzhager, Frank
    [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.
  • Publication
    Don't Worry, Be Happy - Exploring Users' Emotions During App Usage for Requirements Engineering
    ( 2019)
    Stade, Melanie
    ;
    Scherr, Simon André
    ;
    Mennig, Patrick
    ;
    Elberzhager, Frank
    ;
    Seyff, Norbert
    User feedback and usage data are a valuable source of knowledge for requirements engineering (RE) and software evolution. Recent research in RE has focused on the acquisition and analysis of such user input. However, we argue that important information complementing existing data has been neglected, namely users' emotions shown during app usage, which provide insight into how users experience the app. We are aware that tracking users' emotions at large-scale might be challenging. So far, emotion tracking is often applied in lab and test settings only. We envision an unobtrusive emotion tracker running on the users' smartphones in their regular usage context. However, we do not know whether such an approach would be accepted by the app users and which requirements such an emotion-tracking solution would need to fulfill. In this paper, we present the first results from our exploratory interview study with eight mobile app users regarding their preferences and concerns with respect to emotion tracking. Early results are encouraging and suggest that app users tend to accept emotion tracking during app usage, having only minor privacy concerns. In this paper, we discuss our ongoing research, including the long-term direction and prospects of considering users' emotions for RE.