AI & Soc (2001) 15:316-343 92001 Springer-Verlag London Limited A~I I~ ~0~1 [ll~'~q Deferred System's Design: Situated System Requirements Gathering with Hyper-Tmodeller Nandish V. Patel Department of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK Abstract: The conceptual foundations underpinning the approach to system requirements gathering considered in this paper are deferred system's design and tailorable information systems. In this approach users of information systems are regarded as active developers. System requirements gathering is considered from an interpretative and situated perspective using the Hyper-Tmodeller CASE tool. The tool enables better interpretative and situated system requirements gathering, through visual modelling by users and professional system developers. It is designed to address the requirements communication gap between system analysts, designers and eventual users. Keywords: Deferred system design; Hypermedia; Hyper-Tmodeller; Modelling; Situated systems development; Tailorable information systems 1. Introduction The gathering and management of system requirements information is both an important and problematic issue in information system (IS) development. It is a process consisting of collecting, organising, displaying, interpreting and applying requirements information to IS development. This process requires communication among different stakeholders such as management, systems developers, and users, which is problematic in system development terms. This is especially the case during system requirements gathering. Recent developments in prototypical system development (Pressman, 1997) have not alleviated problematic communicative processes between developers and users. Previous relevant research on requirement gathering may be categorised into four phases: traditional methods, user participative methods, and end-user computing and evolutionary methods. Traditional, participative and evolutionary methods encourage users to participate in system development, but they assume that users are technically competent to do so. The user participation research into system development tends to include users as non-professionals aiding in