Towards Understanding Requirements for eScience: the eDiaMoND case study
Marina Jirotka, Rob Procter, Chris Hinds, Catelijne Coopmans, James Soutter and Sharon LLoyd
Requirements and eScience
eScience and system development
eScience another domain for technological development
Previous studies of why system development projects fail
Requirements activities
Eliciting, analysing and specifying functional and non-functional requirements
Development process and managing requirements exercises
Managing conflict and trade offs
Range of requirements issues
Security, visualisation of information, data storage management and retrieval, data mining…..
Context of work attempting to support - To determine what properties a system should have to succeed in the environment in which it will be used
Who needs Requirements?
eScience is complex challenging domain
Supporting large scale collaboration
Understanding interdisciplinary work
Context of scientific work, how data generated, used and shared
Professional expertise
Understanding different types of knowledge
Knowledge in use, not only as classifications
Range of participants/stakeholders involved
Biologists, chemists, health clinicians, physicists, zoologists, etc
Academic, industrial, scientific research communities
Introduction to e-DiaMoND
£4.1m budget funded through EPSRC/DTI and IBM SUR grant
2 year project started December 2002
Academic and commercial collaborators over 12 sites
Deliver prototype to support breast screening in UK
Large distributed database of annotated mammograms
Applications will be developed for:
• Teaching and education
• Screening/diagnosis
• Epidemiology
Ambitious, flagship project, with short time-scales
eDiaMoND Project Team
ChurchillHospital(CHU)
GuysHospital(GUY)
St. Georges Hospital(GEO)
Ardmillan
Oxford University
Context of Requirements Capture
Challenging complex domain
Highly volatile - social and organisational issues
Critical - dealing with people’s health care
Range of participants/stakeholders involved
Doctors, nurses, admin, researchers, geneticists, epidemiologists, radiologists, radiographers….
Different stakeholders on project, academic, industrial, clinical
Professional medical expertise
Understanding knowledge
Tacit understanding and apprenticeship
UK Breast Screening – Today
Began in 1988
Women 50-64ScreenedEvery 3 Years1 View/Breast
~100 BreastScreeningProgrammes- Scotland- Wales- Northern Ireland- England
1,300,000 - Screened in 2001-0265,000 - Recalled for Assessment8,545 – Cancers detected300 - Lives per year Saved
230 - Radiologists (Double Reading)
Film
Paper
Statistics from NHS Cancer Screening web site
UK Breast Screening – Challenges
230 - Radiologists (Double Reading)50% - Workload Increase
2,000,000 - Screened every Year120,000 - Recalled for Assessment10,000 - Cancers1,250 - Lives Saved
Women 50-70ScreenedEvery 3 Years2 Views/Breast+ DemographicIncrease
~100 BreastScreeningProgrammes- Scotland- Wales- N Ireland- England
Digital
Digital
Areas of Technological Interest
Non digital films and light boxes - transition to digital Non standard reporting systems - full integration Manual movement of data - Grid Reporting difficult - Database and Grid Training through mentoring - Computer based training via Grid Localised epidemiological studies - Database and Grid CADe not used - enabled by Grid and Digital Reading
QuickTime™ and aDV - NTSC decompressor
are needed to see this picture.
Towards Practice-Centred Requirements Analysis
Understanding of work practices
interviews, fieldwork and video analysis, design workshops, prototyping, user acceptance
Managing conflict between different stakeholders
design workshops, user participation, trade off concerns of technical partners and other stakeholders, user acceptance and expectations
Understanding of transition from user to system requirements
communication and expression of requirements, ethnographers and developers, organisational constraints, hierarchy of requirements, modelling, prioritisation, quasi-naturalistic evaluation of prototypes, blueprints, user acceptance
elicitation and verification
analysis and verification
specification and verification
Iterative Requirements Process
Understanding of local and organisational concerns
Sharing Data within BSU
Visibility and accountability of work transformed
Practical ethical action - safety culture
Flexible role based access structure
Letters
X-Rays, Notes, Screening forms
Light BoxesHigh volume readingSome portable machinesManual hangingAdministratively intense
Notes, Screening formsPatient Folders
Radiology reportingsystems
Sharing Data Across BSUs
Allows rapid movement of mammograms and patient related data between BSUs
Distributed reading - maximising use of scarce skills
Double reading, professional judgement and trust
Need to follow case from beginning to end
Concern over automated allocation of cases to radiologists
Useful in symptomatic clinics
Sharing Data Across Disciplines
Value of database to epidemiologists
Orient to ethical concerns
Impact on eDiaMoND project
Acquiring information to improve healthcare for public interest vs protecting citizens from unscrupulous use of personal data
Anonymisation, consent and confidentiality
Epidemiologists cannot specify complete data requirements
Research work and scientific publications
Lessons Learned Without understanding the details and context of clinicians’ work we risk
building systems that are not fit for purpose
eHealth complex collaborative domain diverse range of professional expertise volatile organisational issues
Focussing on work practices, organisational issues… Understanding of work flow, collaborative practices and everyday work of clinicians Techniques to inform design of eScience technologies
Transforming the eScience vision of sharing data We must be sensitive to the ways in which skills such as reading mammograms
and researching into causes of breast cancer are developed and maintained and how these will be transformed by eScience technology
Lessons Learned 2
Don’t ignore previous research in areas such as CSCW regarding global collaboration and virtual organisations
New issues in eScience
Scale and expertise needed for global collaboration - CSCW
Practical implications from studies of science and scientific knowledge - SSK
Development models and requirements for eScience -RE