Requirements engineering process improvement in health IT projects. Master’s Thesis

Abstract

Research has proved that requirements engineering in e-health projects is a challenge. Many of the ehealth software end-users do not believe in investment in this process and e-health vendors find it challenging to deliver what client wants without having defined requirements accurately. Healthcare is an industry where patient information is very crucial not just for the patient but also for healthcare providers. Appropriate health related information is one of the keys to quality care of the patient. This has been the reason for computerising business processes in healthcare. Given that many privacy models can be applied to protect patient’s health information and complex business models and processes in healthcare, designing and developing such IT processes needs to be meticulously analysed and implemented. This thesis deliberates on requirements engineering effort required for e-health vendors in delivering complex IT projects for e-health. The aim of this thesis is to study approaches taken by software engineers in an e-health vendor company in accomplishing such complex projects. The approach of literature review, survey and interviews has been adopted to investigate the requirements engineering effort carried out in such projects. An optimised solution has been presented with the help of quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collected data, conglomeration of different approaches defined by contemporary researchers and usage of Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 2012 to improve the requirement engineering process in the e-health vendor organisation.