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Details of Grant 

EPSRC Reference: GR/J53461/01
Title: COLLABORATIVE REQUIREMENTS CAPTURE TOOL
Principal Investigator: Sharples, Professor M
Other Investigators:
Researcher Co-Investigators:
Project Partners:
Pre Nexus Migration Racal
Department: Sch of Engineering and Informatics
Organisation: University of Sussex
Scheme: Standard Research (Pre-FEC)
Starts: 01 December 1993 Ends: 30 November 1996 Value (£): 188,790
EPSRC Research Topic Classifications:
Human-Computer Interactions
EPSRC Industrial Sector Classifications:
Creative Industries
Related Grants:
Panel History:  
Summary on Grant Application Form
To build collaborative requirements capture tool which can assist in the design of a complex electronic device, from the initial sales contact through the financial and engineering planning to the stage of a worked-out proposal. This tool is to allow users of different types to contribute their own expertise to the emerging design and to extract from it the information that is useful to them. Progress:At the end of the first year of the project there is an interim prototype that demonstrates the idea and will be used for indicative user trials. This prototype has been informed by workplace studies and makes use of a common data model that is shared by all the system components. The prototype includes the ability to generate five types of summary from the design information. The University of Sussex is employing an eclectic approach to the workplace studies that does not conform to any particular methodological stance, but which is responsive to needs and problems encountered in a commercial setting. In particular, it has been necessary to develop methods appropriate for a situation where information is considered to be highly commercially sensitive. It has necessitated considerable liaison with the industrial partner to identify methods of collecting and analysing data at a fairly coarse level of granularity which require a minimum of imposition on personnel, but provide adequate richness of data for analysis. Interim results will be presented at the CSCW 94 Conference. The workplace studies have informed the design of the interim prototype. The prototype tool captures functional, construction and design rationale information about electronic equipment under design, in a unified database and provides multiple viewpoints on this database. To guide the users, the tool includes an automatically managed agenda supported by an expert system. This agenda is the subject of a paper to be published in CHI 95 conference proceedings.
Key Findings
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Potential use in non-academic contexts
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Summary
Date Materialised
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Organisation Website: http://www.sussex.ac.uk