SoD-TEAM: Monitoring in Support of Design Science Principles

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Software evolution, through maintenance or updates, requires the greatest effort in the software industry's product life-cycle. This effort is increasing with the industry's desire to be more responsive to customer needs. Mass customization, and related theories, provides guidance for producing high quality, low cost, mass-produced craft products. The design theories, however, provide no guidance for post-purchase customization, as required of software evolution. This project contributes to a Science of Design by addressing how to keep a software application's behavior in line with the requirements. The Requirements Monitoring (ReqMon) approach taken in this research provides guidance on when and what aspects of software should be evolved by dynamically monitoring individual user goals.Assistive technologies (AT), which support individuals with disabilities such as cognitive impairments (CI), are in the vanguard of those that require individually personalized software. Monitoring individual user goals during their use of AT may mitigate the commonplace abandonment of AT, by providing clinicians and designers the necessary and timely feedback for continuous adaptation and redesign of software-intensive AT. A new, personalized design science is needed to improve the design, use, function and stability of AT systems to assist the large and growing population of individuals that required AT to fully participation in society.This research is developing user goal monitoring tools and theory in support of dynamically personalizing AT specifically, and software evolution more generally. This research will offer two contributions. First, the monitoring method provides an approximate solution to understanding the dynamically changing needs of software users. Second, the mass-personalized software development (MPSD) theory provides a framework for analyzing continuously personalized designs in mass markets. MPSD suggests strategies for post-purchase customization of digital products.