End-user requirements modelling: an experience report from digital agriculture

Context and motivation: End-user development focuses on enabling non-professional programmers to create or extend software applications on their own. However, before beginning the development process, software engineering best practices recommend performing requirements engineering (RE) activities, including requirements modelling.Question/problem: There is limited research on how end-users can model system requirements. Principal ideas/results: In this experience report, we investigate the problem of end-user requirements modelling in an EU-funded project about agricultural digitalisation. Specifically, a team of agronomists was directly involved in the creation of UML, iStar, and BPMN diagrams to model the transformation of socio-technical processes in four different concrete scenarios. They followed a formalisation procedure proposed within an RE method designed to help stakeholders evaluate the impact of agricultural digitalisation. Starting from textual reports including a description of the process as-is and the process-to-be, they followed step-by-step guidelines for model creation. Contribution: This paper reports insights from the experience from the viewpoint of the agronomists and software engineers involved. We identify nine key lessons that highlight the added value of end-user requirements modelling for achieving a shared and in-depth understanding of the socio-technical processes under analysis.