USER INVOLVEMENT IN THE EARLY STAGES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF AN AIRCRAFT WARNING SYSTEM

There is an increasing awareness of the importance and the benefits to be attained from consulting the end-users during system and product d evelopment. Although the rationale of utilizing the expertise of end-u sers in the system development life cycle appears to provide an appare ntly straightforward, even 'ideal' approach, there are many difficulti es associated with eliciting the required knowledge from experts, both general and specific to every user group. Furthermore, many developer s do not know how to involve users, or if they do, they do not utilize them to best effect. In the avionics sphere, the wealth of knowledge possessed by line pilots and flight engineers represents a vital infor mation resource for the design of future flight-deck systems. As a spe cific example, this paper overviews some of the considerations which a rose from working with these end-users in the early stages of the deve lopment of a warning and diagnostic system for civil aircraft. The end -goal of this particular phase of the work was the generation of guide lines for the design of the interface for the software engineers to us e when building the prototype, and the methodological approach taken t o achieve this is reported here.