A Novel Approach to Bridging the Gap between Cognitive Engineers and Software System Engineers

A. Fouse and J. Pfautz

Human Factors & Ergonomics Society 50th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (October, 2006)

To aid the development and deployment of complex software systems, techniques are needed to ensure effective communication between human factors and cognitive engineers, the software system engineers, and other stakeholders (e.g., users of the system under development, project managers). In this paper, we present a novel approach to addressing this need. Our approach is based on the view that systems development is a holistic process and we need to understand how to best to integrate human factors and cognitive engineering as a component of that process, rather than explicitly altering the systems engineering process to incorporate human factors and cognitive engineering. We describe this approach in more detail, and present a tool that embodies this approach by facilitating communication among stakeholders by leveraging existing software tools used in systems development.

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