Augmentative Requirements Engineering

Abstract : The widening digital divide in today’s interconnected world is more than an access issue in terms of technology availability and affordability. Concerns like media accessibility, information mobilization and consciousness need to be approached comprehensively, especially when dealing with sensitive user groups. Discovering, understanding and efficiently implementing proper requirements for augmentative and alternative communication is essential for supporting the users with complex communication needs in their everyday life, from work engagement to personal settings. By enforcing the usage of information and communication technologies to help solve these issues, users’ needs and desires have to be analyzed carefully, by learning from educational, psychological and rehabilitation methods from other fields already deeply involved with life-care for these people. Augmentative requirements engineering is a requirements engineering framework that provides a holistic view on requirements for augmentative and alternative communication services, concerning sensitive users’ abilities and needs, service domain and associated intermediary users. The new paradigm is experience-driven from a series of concluded projects and implemented applications for various user groups in Croatia.