Requirements Analysis and Design of IRB System

Abstract

Institutional review boards (IRB) are established by institutions to protect (human) research subjects from abuse. Researchers are thus required to apply and obtain IRB ap- proval for any research initiative that involves human subjects. Currently, most USA institutions use paper-based or partially automated approaches for IRB application, review, and approval processes. This can be cumbersome, error-prone and usually add unnecessary workloads to researchers. Moreover, paper- based approaches can delay or reduce research output, especially during collaborative research projects if researchers are from different institutions. Web-based information systems can be developed and used to streamline IRB application and approval processes. Before such web-based systems can be developed, the requirements of the system have to be analyzed and designed. However, requirements analysis and design are usually very tedious and expensive project, which may discourage some institutions from implementing systems to support IRB processes. The aim of this paper is to contribute a set of requirements and systems models that can be customized and re-used, by other institutions, to develop IRB Systems. Accordingly, we provide the following models, use case, feature tree model, and network diagram. In addition, we discussed our experiences and systems analysis principles we adopt to make this project a success. We believe that the experiences we share and the models we provide in this paper can inform practice and advance the knowledge of web-based information systems development. Re-using existing requirements and designs can also help to reduce the amount of time and cost required to develop similar systems.