Modelling human-centric aspects of end-users with iStar

Abstract

Human-centric characteristics of the end-users of software systems, such as gender, age, emotions, personality, language, culture, and physical and mental impairments, play an essential role in the uptake and usage of the software. Current software tools suffer from the lack of in-depth elicitation and understanding of these human-centric requirements during the design and modelling of the system. This can lead to ineffective and hard to use software for some users. In this paper, to be able to account for contextual variables in human interaction with diverse characteristics, we propose an approach for using personas and contexts to model human-centric aspects of the software in goal models. To achieve this, we select the iStar language due to its ability to model social, intentional and strategic dimensions, and propose an extension of it to model human-centric aspects of the software. Our novel approach is illustrated with two examples. We conducted user evaluation studies to understand how users model human aspects, and also to measure the effectiveness of our approach. Results show the lack of consideration of the human-centric aspects in existing modelling frameworks and how our extended model can simplify the understanding and addressing of such aspects. This shows and encourages that more research on modelling human aspects of the end-users is required to achieve human-centred modelling.