Human Factors Requirements: Being Involved in the First Stage of System Development

Abstract

One of the common refrains among human factors professionals is “We need to be involved earlier in the process.” One of the earliest stages of any project is requirements definition. However, developing requirements is not a skill many of us learned in school. Requirements definition is not easy even for other engineering domains. At a minimum, a well written requirement expresses a necessary and verifiable characteristic of the end system in simple, clear, and concise language. Necessary characteristics are those aspects of a system that can be traced to technological or user need. Requirements that are verifiable are those that can be proven not necessarily only by testing, but could be confirmed through inspection or demonstration as well. Finally requirements must be written in simple, clear and concise language in order to ensure that there is no ambiguity in its interpretation. There are many who think it is a quixotic task to write clear, verifiable and effective requirements that involve humans. Some of the arguments are that humans are too unreliable for testing or that there are few known thresholds in human related factors as such human factors requirements are not verifiable. The result is human factors professionals have not been brought in to the requirements definition process. Even when human factors professionals are included, they may be challenged by the complexity of the job. In this panel, highly experienced human factors professionals who have worked in a variety of domains (e.g., military, government, commercial, and academia) will discuss identifying and writing good human factors requirements, lessons learned on becoming a part of the requirements definition process, how to teach requirements writing to new human factors professionals, and a framework for capturing the nuances of human factors requirements.