A Cognition Model of Story Driven Object Modeling

Abstract

The quality of requirement specifications is crucial to the success of an information system development project. Numerous studies have shown that incorrect and missing information requirements will lead to serious problems in the later phases of an information system development. Requirement analysis is an error prone process, especially for novice information analysts. It is believed that weak cognitive ability of novice information analysts is the most important cause for low quality of requirement specifications. Studies have shown that human beings learn best from stories. Stories can provide more complete and detailed information requirements in a form appealing to human cognition and hence impose lighter cognitive load on novice information analysts. Storytelling has therefore been recommended as an effective tool in the communication process of requirement analysis. However, it is still unclear that how the stories can be transformed into structured requirement specifications such as object models from the perspective of a novice information analyst. By literature review on cognitive research, this study proposes a cognitive model of requirement analysis on the basis of storytelling to build a high-level object model as requirement specifications. Future research directions are also explored on how to use the cognitive model to improve the performance of novice information analysts in generating more complete and correct requirement specifications.