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