The need to understand the social context within which work to be supported by computer-based systems takes place is broadly recognised within the RE community. Ethnographic studies have been used in particular to inform the requirements process from a social perspective. To make this accessible to requirements engineers, work in this area has focused on how to integrate and communicate ethnographic findings on a per project basis but scant attention has been paid to how findings from individual studies may be generalised and re-used for the purposes of RE in new settings. This paper is intended to introduce our resource of Patterns of Cooperative Interaction to the RE community. These patterns specifically compare and contrast a variety of ethnographic findings, discuss their relevance to design and provide an introduction to the analytic sensibilities of such studies. We discuss how we developed patterns of interaction from a corpus of ethnographic studies, illustrate a selection of these patterns and suggest how the patterns collection can be used by requirements engineers as a means of highlighting potential social issues that are or relevance to the system requirements and as a means of generating requirements that support social interaction.

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[28] Whalen J., Zimmerman D., Whalen M., “When Words Fail: A Single Case Analysis,” Social Problems, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 335-363, 1988. Ian Sommerville is a professor of software engineering at Lancaster University, England. He has been involved in software engineering research for more than 20 years and has particular interests in software requirements engineering, systems dependability and social and organisational issues in software engineering. He has published more than 100 technical papers and is the author of several books on software topics including a widely used textbook on software engineering, first published in 1982 and now in its 6th edition. David Martin originally graduated with a degree in psychology before going on to complete a Masters in Informatics and then a PhD on ‘Ethnomethdodology and Systems Design’ in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. For the last 3 years, he has been working as a research associate in the Computing Department of Lancaster University on a variety of projects with research interests, particularly focused on the role of ethnography and ethnomethodology in systems design. Most recently, this research has been directed towards deriving patterns from the corpus of ethnographic studies of work and technology. Mark Rouncefield is a senior research fellow in Lancaster University's Computing Department researching in general problems of systems engineering as a cooperative process. His research interests are strongly inter-disciplinary, covering Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) and the empirical study of work, organisation, human factors and interactive computer systems design. He is particularly associated with the development of ethnography as a method for informing design and his empirical studies of work and technology have contributed to debates concerning the relationship between social and technical aspects of IT systems design and use.