Integrating ethnography into the requirements engineering process

Experiences from an interdisciplinary project involving software engineers and sociologists are reported. The project is concerned with discovering the requirements of a user interface to a flight database which is used to provide real-time information to air-traffic controllers. The sociologists are conducting an ethnographic analysis of the activity of air-traffic control, and this is being used for the development of a prototype system. An overview of the project is given, the contribution of sociologists to requirements engineering is discussed, and tool support which will allow ethnographic observations to be integrated into the requirements engineering process is suggested