A Summary of Human-System Integration in the System Development Process

In a recent book, Pew and Mavor and the Committee on Human-System Design Support for Changing Technology (2007) proposed a revision to Boehm’s Spiral Model for system development. This revision encourages considering the user within a system as a source of risk. Where these risks are significant, this approach suggests ways to reduce the risk through appropriate studies of the user. This tutorial provides a summary of this model and some of the insights and extensions of this model based on teaching it. These insights are related to learning: learning by the field through using this approach to organize methods and techniques, learning by system development managers that there are sometimes risks related to humans using their systems (and implications for how to teach this), learning about designers as stakeholders, and learning by designers as lessons from one design are applied to later designs. These insights and extensions suggest the importance of shared representations such as cognitive models for educating team members and for the system development process.