RCIS 2016 Conference

1. Mahmood Hosseini,Alimohammad Shahri, Keith Phalp and RaianAli
Bournemouth University
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2.  Introduction
 What are transparency requirements?
 Peculiarities of transparency
 Motivation
 Why crowdsourcing?
 Why structured feedback?
 Why social adaptation?
 Overviews
 Overview of transparency reference models
 Overview of our proposed framework
 Overview of structured feedback elements
 Applying the concepts in the engineering of transparency requirements
 Applying crowdsourcing
 Applying structured feedback
 Applying social adaptation
 Conclusion and future work
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IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion

3. IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion
What information should I
put on my product label?
(THE RIGHTTO SHOW)
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4. IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion
What information do I
need to know in aT&C?
(THE RIGHTTO KNOW)
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5.  Non functional requirements
 Getting more attention
 The change of the millennium
 Social crises, e.g., Panama Papers and Ashley Madison
 Financial crises, e.g., the one in 2008
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IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion
Image courtesy of Time, 14 Apr 2016

6.  Initiatives to handle transparency requirements
 E.g., Freedom of Information Act, Open Government
 Need for engineering
 Reference models, conceptual models, tools, automated
analysis
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IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion

7.  What to disclose
 Informational needs of the stakeholders
 Who to disclose to
 Stakeholder identification, their different needs
 When to disclose
 Timeliness
 How much to disclose
 Preventing information overload
 Regulations and limitations
 Other non-functional requirements such as privacy
 Evolution over time
 Information life span, transient requirement
 Targeted transparency vs. tailored transparency
 Role level vs. individual level
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IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion

8. 8
Transparency
is providing
high quality
information
Transparency
should be
meaningful for
its users
Transparency
is synonymous
with
information
Transparenc
y should only
reach those
who need it
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IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion
Transparency is
about
accessible,
understandable
information

9.  Crowdsourcing allows the engagement of a
large, diverse crowd
 It has been investigated in RE activities
 StakeRare, StakeSource, REfine, CrowdREquire
 It can be considered as a solution to dynamic
or bi-directional transparency
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IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion

10.  Easier to aggregate, process, analyse and
evaluate
 Its use has been investigated in
crowdsourcing activities
 Transparency attributes allow for structured
feedback
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IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion

11.  Social adaptation regards user feedback as
the main driving force for software evolution
 A good fit for transparency requirements
 They are volatile
 They change over time
 They vary for different stakeholders
 We need social adaptation to ensure the
crowd is heard
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12. 01/06/2016 12
IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion
(Presented in RE 2015)

13. 01/06/2016 13
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(Facets Presented in REFSQ 2016)

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IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion
(Facets Presented in REFSQ 2016)

15. 01/06/2016 15
Kahn, B. K., Strong, D. M., & Wang, R. Y. (2002). Information quality benchmarks: product and service
performance. Communications of the ACM, 45(4), 184-192.
IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion
(FacetsPresentedinREFSQ2016)

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monitor
analyse plan
execute

17. IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion
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18.  The four pillars of crowdsourcing
match transparency actors
 The crowd: information receivers
 The crowdsourcer: information
provider
 The crowdsourced task:
transparency provision
 The crowdsourcing platform:
information medium
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IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion

19.  Crowdsourcing for the identification of
stakeholders
 Identification of alternative information providers,
as acknowledged in Section 2(21)(1) of UK FOIA
 Identification of alternative information mediums
 Creation of alternative information mediums,
e.g., by sharing information in social media
 Identification of other information receivers, i.e.,
spreading transparency to those who need it
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20.  Spotting transparency meaningfulness
mismatch (i.e., mismatches in data, process,
and/or policy transparency)
 Annotation of information as data, process and policy
 Notifying where information concerning data, process,
and policy is missing through requests of information
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IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion

21.  Information availability:
 Missing information
 Disseminating information for better
reach
 Information interpretation:
 Crowd interpretation of the information
into a more crowd-friendly language
 Helping formal interpreters, e.g., news
agencies in local issues
 Compare interpretations
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22.  Information accessibility:
 Spotting difficulties in access, e.g., too
many clicks, obsolete electronic formats
 Enhancing accessibility by sharing
 Information perception:
 Perception sharing to help information
providers reduce the perception gap
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23.  Information understandability:
 Highlighting ambiguities, discrepancies,
etc., e.g., in aTerms and Conditions
document
 Information acceptance:
 Sharing their acceptance/refusal, and the
reason for it, e.g., lack of reputation of
the news source
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IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion

24.  Information actionability:
 Sharing if and how information is
useful, similar to celebrity
endorsements, e.g., an increase in
the annual fee resulting in bank
customers moving their money to
other banks
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IntroductionMotivationOverviewsApplicationsConclusion

25.  Product/service quality dimensions
conforming to specifications
 Finding inconsistencies, imprecisions,
etc.
 Product/service quality dimensions
meeting or exceeding consumer
expectations
 Crowd feedback must be elicited in the
quality assurance of these dimensions
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26.  Pinpointing the loci where transparency
has been successful or has failed:
 On the level of transparency required
(i.e., data, process, policy)
 On the last step where transparency has
been achieved or failed (i.e., availability,
interpretation, accessibility, perception,
understandability, acceptance,
actionability)
 On the information quality in
transparency
 On stakeholder identification and
medium discovery
 Still, the use of free-form comment is
recommended along with structured
feedback
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27.  Transparency requirements are often individual,
context-dependent, and emerging requirements
 Every individual’s transparency requirement
should be ideally elicited, similar to the industry
idea of mass customisation
 For transparency, a continuous feedback
acquisition facilitates mass customisation
 How, what, where, when to disclose and to whom
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28.  Monitoring:
 Stakeholders’ transparency requirements change
with the change of time and context, and they
often become obsolete as soon as they are met
 Monitoring through feedback is necessary to
ensure transparency requirements are met all the
time
 The power of the crowd can be harnessed through
structured feedback for the engineering of
transparency requirements
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29.  Analysis:
 Structured feedback can help the analysis of
transparency requirements
 Modelling and formalisation of transparency
requirements helps reasoning and analysis
 We have proposed a domain-specific modelling
language,TranspLan, for the engineering of
transparency requirements
▪ (to be presented in CAiSE 2016)
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30.  Planning:
 Finding the best alternative for satisficing
transparency requirements
 Using recommender systems helps in the
selection of alternatives
 User profiling helps recommender systems
understand users’ interests
 Execution:
 Just consider that transparency requirements are
transient!
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31.  We proposed a conceptual
framework for utilising
crowdsourcing and social
adaptation through structured
feedback for engineering and
evolving transparency
requirements
 Our future work will be
consolidating the proposed
framework, and providing
methods supported by automated
tools for covering the entire life
cycle of transparency requirements
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monitor
analyse plan execute

32.  The research is supported by an FP7 Marie
Curie CIG grant (the SOCIAD project).
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