Managing ethical requirements elicitation of complex socio-technical systems with critical systems thinking: A case of course-timetabling project

Complex socio-technical systems pose considerable challenges to requirements elicitation due to dynamic boundary conditions and conflicting perspectives. Traditional requirements engineering is criticized for its failure in providing a systemic view, overlooking ethical concerns and marginalized social perspectives. It is argued that educational institutions as a part of society need to ethically develop and manage their academic processes and consider such perspectives for emancipation. This critical qualitative research applies the emancipatory systemic methodology of critical systems thinking (CST) for the requirements elicitation of a complex and dynamic university course-timetables management problem. Firstly, the problem is ethically formulated to mitigate Type III errors. Secondly, multiple viewpoints are sought for boundary judgments using a CST-based ethical inquiry of boundary critique to reveal the normative content of the project design, explore imbalances amongst the socio-technical design components, and unveil the underlying ethical issues. The dynamic stakeholder network captures the system’s emergence through stakeholder interconnectedness and boundary liquidity by sweeping-in relevant stakeholders through the continuum of various states of the project. This work enlightens requirements engineering by coupling systemic and socio-technical lenses for the elicitation of ethical requirements and the emancipation of marginalized perspectives in complex and dynamic information systems projects in general and timetabling problems, in particular.