Improving the documentation of user’s requirements for e-service systems using service responsibility tables

Abstract

Popularity of the internet has caused an increase in the demand and usage of e-service systems. E-Service is defined as acts or performances that are delivered through electronic devices and networks to help people complete tasks, solve problems, or conduct transactions. The nature of e-service poses challenges in analyzing and developing the e-service systems. In recent years, UML as a tool used for analyzing systems has been criticized by several researchers and practitioners for its complexity and lack of comprehension. This has caused difficulties in using UML to analyse e-service system. As a result of this, Service Responsibility Tables (SRT) has been proposed to be used for analyzing e-service systems. Service responsibility tables is a light weight analysis tool was developed based on the concept of service value chain framework, which focuses on the activities and responsibilities of both service providers and customers based on the broad observation that service tends to be co-produced by service producers and service consumers. This research investigates the usability of SRTs as an informal language and light weight analysis tool for analyzing e-service systems, using Graduate Studies Management System (GSMS) as a case study and presents the evaluation of the tool by the users. Furthermore, the research proposed a heuristics approach for transforming the SRTs into activity diagrams and sequence diagram. From the evaluations, we found that the proposed heuristic approach could increase the involvement of users in requirements determination process and hence improve the documentation of users’ requirements for e-service systems.