Communicating Stakeholders’ needs
Vision Videos to Disclose, Discuss, and Align Mental Models for Shared Understanding
By: Oliver Karras (@KarrasOliver)
Associate Editor: Muneera Bano (@DrMuneeraBano)
One central task in
requirements engineering (RE) is to understand, document, and convey the needs
of diverse stakeholders among all parties involved. The process of coordinating
and communicating these needs so that the development team can implement a
solution that the stakeholders accept is called requirements communication. Requirements
communication involves developing and negotiating a shared
understanding
of the goals, plans, status, and context of a project among all project partners,
which requires disclosing, discussing, and aligning their mental models of the future
system, i.e. their visions. A mental model is a conceptual idea in the mind of
a person that represents the person’s individual understanding of how a system
will work. Shared understanding leads to a common vision that summarizes the
essence of the mental models of all stakeholders of the ultimate system that
satisfies their needs. This common vision, in turn, describes the boundary of
the system and thus its scope. Therefore, shared understanding is
one of the most important objectives in RE since it enables the
stakeholders and development team to assess and agree on what the relevant
requirements are and what the meaning of these requirements is regarding the
future system.
The Challenge of Establishing a Common Vision
Stakeholders and the development team can achieve shared understanding more easily if they use
practices that support proactive information exchange among
them.
However, current RE practices mainly describe a vision as text. This
representation is less suited for communication with a proactive information
exchange due to two main reasons. First, the inherent restrictions of natural
language such as ambiguity and abstraction increase the likelihood of
undetected misunderstandings that limit shared understanding. Second, textual
documentation cannot capture all information that is relevant to stakeholders
and the development team. Mental models are difficult to capture since they are
intangible due to their tacit representations in the persons’ minds. Thus,
mental models require other communication mechanisms that are more suited for proactive
information exchange to disclose, discuss, and align them to establish a common
vision and thus shared understanding.
Vision Videos for Shared Understanding
In contrast to text, video is a more promising
communication mechanism for shared understanding when
representing a vision. Such a video, so-called vision video, visualize a vision
of a future system, i.e., the video producer’s mental model. This visualization
discloses the mental model by externalizing the model and thus making it
tangible. However, even this external representation does not encapsulate
shared understanding but merely aids to develop shared
understanding.
The explicit representation provides a reference point for the active
discussion among the parties involved to align their mental models. The desired
result of a common vision can be more easily achieved since critical issues of
the mental models are identified, discussed, understood, and, at best resolved
by making them explicit and obvious. The established common vision, in turn,
reduces the risk of misunderstandings due to false assumptions.
Vision video
A vision
video is a video that represents a vision or parts of it for achieving shared
understanding among all parties involved by disclosing, discussing, and
aligning their mental models of the future system.
|
Current Research on Vision Videos
Vision videos
are no new practice. One well-known example of a vision video is Apple’s Knowledge Navigator (1987). Since
2017, the YouTube channel “EU Science and Innovation” provides a playlist of vision videos
of research and innovation projects funded by the European Union. These videos
highlight the future impact of the projects on the life of Europe’s citizens
and society as a whole.
Despite the benefits of
vision videos, videos are not an
established communication mechanism for shared understanding. In a survey, I
investigated the obstacles that prevent software professional from producing
and using videos in RE. In particular, I found that software professionals (1)
perceive the effort of producing and using videos in RE as too high; and (2)
lack knowledge about how to produce good videos. Based on these findings, I
currently work on an affordable video approach that enables
software professionals to produce and use vision videos for shared
understanding at moderate costs and sufficient quality. This approach consists
of two concepts. First, I work on including videos as a by-product of established
RE practices and techniques, such as prototyping and workshops, to reduce
the production effort. Second, I am working on a quality model for vision
videos to guide video production by software professionals. This quality model will
offer a basis for software professionals to estimate the consequent effort and
activities to produce a good vision video. I believe that these two concepts
can help to integrate vision videos in RE to support effective requirements
communication with a proactive information exchange for establishing a shared
understanding among all parties involved.
