University of Twente Student Theses
The situated cognitive engineering tool
Posthumus, Wytse Jan (2011) The situated cognitive engineering tool.
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Abstract: | With the increasing complexity of systems, more effort is required of users to control them. Engineering methods, however, do not always consider the limitations of the psychological capabilities of users. To address these limitations, an approach to create systems was developed in the 1980s, namely Cognitive Engineering (CE). The Cognitive Engineering approach was developed to improve the design of systems that are oriented at effective human-computer interaction (Hollnagel and Woods, 1983). To increase the knowledge base of systems which are designed in a certain domain, TNO has developed the situated Cognitive Engineering methodology as an extension to Cognitive Engineering (Neerincx and Lindenberg, 2008). Currently, the sCE methodology is applied using textual documents. However, this approach has three main limitations, namely on the areas of collaboration, soundness and completeness and reusability. To address the above mentioned limitations, a software tool could be used instead. Several tools exists, but they do not meet the requirements for usage with the sCE methodology. This thesis proposes a design for a Cognitive Engineering tool to create requirements following the situated Cognitive Engineering Methodology. Knowledge of requirements engineering and the sCE methodology was applied to develop the situated Cognitive Engineering Tool (sCET) to support the developers of joint cognitive systems. sCET was developed according to the four phases of the sCE methodology, namely derive, specify, test and refine. A first version of sCET has been used to further specify its requirements baseline and to test its claims, as the methodology prescribes. This has been done by performing an evaluation on the usage of sCET. The results of the sCET evaluation has been used to refine the methodology and the tool. From these results, improvements for the sCE methodology and the tool have been derived. The results of the evaluation show that sCET addresses the limitations on the areas of collaboration, soundness and completeness and reusability. However, users may dislike learning a new tool if the design and usability of the user-interface are not attractive. Currently, the prototype version of sCET tool is being used in several projects. In the near future, this version will be used to get more experience in the use of a sCE tool. This will give the opportunity to create a new version of sCET which incorporates all the new ideas which have been gathered using the current version of sCET. |
Item Type: | Essay (Master) |
Faculty: | EEMCS: Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science |
Subject: | 54 computer science |
Programme: | Electrical Engineering MSc (60353) |
Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/61137 |
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