Abstract

Currently, there is much interest in harnessing the potential of new and affordable Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) such as mobile phones, to assist in reducing disparities in socioeconomic conditions throughout the world. Such efforts have come to be known as ICT for Development or ICT4D. While this field of research holds much promise, few projects have managed to achieve long-term sustained success. Among the many reasons for this, from a software engineering perspective, in many cases it can be attributed to inadequacies in the gathering and defining of software requirements. Failures in realising sustainable systems stern from inadequate consideration of the high-level socioeconomic development goals, neglect of environmental constraints, and a lack of adequate input from end-users regarding their specific needs and sociocultural context. The situation is exacerbated by inadequate reporting on the social impact of such interventions, making it difficult to assess a project's success, let alone apply lessons learned to new projects. In this thesis we propose enhancing conventional requirements elicitation with a complementary elicitation methodology specifically adapted to address these shortcomings. Our approach is based on a proposed novel technique of Structured Digital Storytelling to elicit input from end-users having limited literacy in the form of stories. The proposed methodology includes a systematic method for extracting and interpreting the informational content of the stories that applies a conceptual model derived from Communications Theory to identify constraints arising from the users' sociocultural context. The thesis introduces an ICT4D quality model identifying non-functional requirements related to the sociodynamics of a system's sustained use in a rural community. The needs, goals and constraints thus identified are integrated using a goal-based analysis to produce a more informed understanding of potential areas of technology intervention and to develop high-level functional and non-functional software requirements. The resulting goal model is also used in deriving a measurement framework for assessing a project's success based on its social impact. We illustrate our approach and validate its effectiveness with a field study. Keywords: ICT4D, digital divide. requirements engineering. needs elicitation, requirements elicitation, culture, storytelling