Improvements to Software Requirement Specifications of Patient Monitoring Software
Poikolainen, Pekka (2022)
2022
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Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2022090719951
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2022090719951
Tiivistelmä
The customer of this thesis was a medical technology company developing patient monitors and the software running in the monitors. Patient monitoring software is a complex system software containing various software units responsible for various physiological parameters that are measured from the patient. The complexity and the magnitude of the software is also reflected in the software requirement specifications and the related requirement management.
To make the requirements and their management simpler and to be able to release the patient monitoring software more frequently to the customers, this thesis aimed to find out issues in the requirement specifications, construct solutions, and implement the solutions into practice through a constructive research method.
Using the constructive research method, the issues were first discussed and identified in a focus group workshop. From the identified issues, two were selected as the focus for the research: (1) using images of the monitor’s graphical user interface as part of the specifications and (2) differentiating between requirements and design details.
The solution for the issue (1) was to remove the images from the specifications and have them developed and maintained in a separate tool. It was noted that it is important to ensure that no specified functionality is lost from the specifications when the images are removed. For the issue (2) the solution was to create common principles for deciding whether a specification item is a requirement or a design detail.
During the research, it became evident that the solutions were not possible to implement to full extent during the thesis process. The thesis report discloses the solutions as far as they were implemented during the research as well as the next steps for the solutions to be fully implemented.
To make the requirements and their management simpler and to be able to release the patient monitoring software more frequently to the customers, this thesis aimed to find out issues in the requirement specifications, construct solutions, and implement the solutions into practice through a constructive research method.
Using the constructive research method, the issues were first discussed and identified in a focus group workshop. From the identified issues, two were selected as the focus for the research: (1) using images of the monitor’s graphical user interface as part of the specifications and (2) differentiating between requirements and design details.
The solution for the issue (1) was to remove the images from the specifications and have them developed and maintained in a separate tool. It was noted that it is important to ensure that no specified functionality is lost from the specifications when the images are removed. For the issue (2) the solution was to create common principles for deciding whether a specification item is a requirement or a design detail.
During the research, it became evident that the solutions were not possible to implement to full extent during the thesis process. The thesis report discloses the solutions as far as they were implemented during the research as well as the next steps for the solutions to be fully implemented.