Now available: Schedule | New: Workshop: Envisioning the System | Workshop: object-oriented databases | Accommodation | Online registration

Abstract

System Envisioning is a creative process for establishing the viability of innovative system concepts and technologies. The ability to design depends partly on being able to visualize something internally, in the "mind's eye.

How do we communicate these images, how do we share "understanding" and vision.

This workshop explores means to optimize the intersection of problem space (as conceived by customers) and solution space (opportunities and technological potential) and produces a "craftsman's handbook" - a collection of techniques and methods for system envisioning. Exploration of technique(s) in envisioning of a virtual environment for developers.

Organization

Martine Devos is Solutions Architect Marketing and Portfolio EDS EMEA. She gives consultancy and training on organizing for reuse and coordinates a research project on Product line development. As IS manager at Argo she initiated and coordinated the development of a framework for administrations and several applications using it. Her main focus is on the use of IS - and "softer software" - to support change programs and learning.

This got her the title of ICT-manger of the year.

She participated in, and organized, several workshops, panels and tutorials at OOPSLA, ECOOP, OT and TOOLS. She was program chair of EuroPlop 2000.

Topic

Software systems are conceived out of an understanding and conceptualizing of a problem space. System Envisioning is a creative process for establishing the viability of innovative system concepts and technologies, by, first reaching a shared understanding of a problem situation and desired future, and aligning them to opportunities through knowledge of solution concepts and architectures.

In the Object community, Use Cases are a popular way of specifying the expected behaviour of a system. But how do we agree the boundary of a system and how is the nature of the system decided?

Business modeling is not enough. Brainstorming sessions about the "system to-be" are often too short and lack methodological support. Pre-occupation with the constraints of the "current business logic" will deny new ideas. There needs to be a place for creative thinking and generating new possibilities.

System envisioning occupies a space in the development life cycle where we foster creativity in conceptualizing solutions to problems by allowing new ways of speaking about and seeing the world. Often creative thinking about systems is born out of metaphors and imagery.

Goals

In this workshop we want to share experiences on how system envisioning has happened and can happen in system development projects. We want to share stories and collect techniques to support the requirements elicitation process and identify interventions and techniques that are important for imagining and sharing the possibilities for a "could-be" or "to-be" system in an OO-development environment.

We work on a collection of techniques and methods suitable for the different phases in the projects cycle.

We wish to share experiences on requirements elicitation and generation techniques that help us think "out-of-the-box". Through techniques such as fantasy , scenario generation/enactment and future search, we attempt to experience what a new system will be like, and what was important to its creation. We focus on the adaptation and utilization of found techniques and methods in OO-practice. Some of the techniques can be "tested" in a life case, e.g. the envisioning process for a virtual collaboration-room for software-developers .

Deliverables

A collection of techniques and creative methods for

Data-gathering

- Exploring design situation
- Searching ideas
- Exploring problem structure
- Evaluation of methods


Examples: lotus blossom, concept café, bug-lists, 5W+H, wildest idea, force field analysis, decomposition matrix, devil's advocacy

Themes

- Requirements elicitation and generation
- Objects and system thinking
- Metaphors
- Creative problem solving and opportunity scouting

Related workshops

- Oopsla '96 System Envisioning Workhop, San Jose, California -- 15 participants
- Oopsla '97 System Envisioning Workshop: Metaphors, Atlanta, Georgia -- 20 participants
- Oopsla '98 System Envisioning Workshop: Imagineering and future search exploration -- 15 partipants
- Oopsla '99 System Envisioning Workshop, Concept Café: Denver, Colorado -- 10 participants
- Oopsla 2000 System Envisioning workshop and Tutorial (A whack on the side of the developer's head)
- EuroPlop'99 Concept Café on Patterns (system envisioning in practice) -- 15 participants
- OT'99 System Envisioning workgroup -- Concept Café -- 26 participants


Websites on System Envisioning with reports on these workshop and references:



http://c2.com:8040/SystemEnvisioning

Proposed agenda

- Intro subject of the workshop by organizers (15 minutes)
- Round of expectations (participants)
- Presentation of methods and techniques and war stories by participants
- Outline of the craft-man's handbook
- Application in a real case -- envisioning a virtual work-environment for developers (or one of the proposed cases)

Requirements for Attendance

The format of the workshop requires that each participant produce a one to two page paper describing stories and insights on system envisioning and tools and techniques used to support the creative design process. On the basis of the themes of the submissions, group structures will be proposed. We will collect techniques to support system envisioning for an outline of a "craft-man's handbook" and use some them to work on a case proposed by participants (or envisioning of a virtual work-environment).

[an error occurred while processing this directive]