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|title=Motivation as a Supplementary Requirement
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==Motivation as a Supplementary Requirement==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1342/02-Posters.pdf
Motivation as a Supplementary Requirement
Alimohammad Shahri, Mahmood Hosseini, Keith Phalp, and Raian Ali
Bournemouth University, United Kingdom
{ashahri,mhosseini,kphalp,rali}@bournemouth.ac.uk
Motivation is a well established topic in psychology and other disciplines such
as business management, education, and health care. Despite the di↵erences in
defining motivation, see [4], motivation is widely seen as the“psychological pro-
cesses that cause the arousal, direction, and persistence of behaviour” [6]. A mo-
tive can be described as the substance that can increase the will of a person to
perform a particular behaviour. Motivation is a requirement per se and can also
supplement other functional and non-functional requirements such as increas-
ing productivity and the social and mental well-being within workplaces [7]. A
correct engineering of motivational mechanisms could eliminate non-productive
behaviours and improve group work [1, 3].
Psychologists have proposed di↵erent models and theories to understand and
improve motivation in people. Well-known examples include the Maslow’s hierar-
chy of needs [5] and Herzberg’s two-factor theory [2]. Maslow’s hierarchy specifies
levels of needs that should be satisfied to keep one happy. Herzberg categorised
influential factors in two groups: motivators and hygiene factors. Presence of mo-
tivators (e.g. social recognition) can increase motivation in employees and give
positive satisfaction; whereas hygiene factors (e.g. job security) will not lead to
motivation, even though a lack of them decreases motivation.
In the field of requirements engineering, systems are generally seen as socio-
technical systems (STS) consisting of various inter-dependent social and tech-
nical actors. It is important to keep the social actors motivated to play their
roles and achieve the requirements allocated to them and enhance their effi-
ciency and also work experience. Such motivation could be also facilitated via
software. Gamification is a term which generally denotes software-based moti-
vation solutions. While motivation involves a wide range of physical and psy-
chological needs, software-based motivation is mostly able to aid in fulfilling a
subset of psychological needs. From the perspective of Maslow’s hierarchy and
Herzberg’s two-factor theory, software-based solutions create environments that
can influence motivator factors and a↵ect hygiene factors. For instance, providing
a leader-board can fulfil one’s need for social recognition, which is a motivator.
We advocate that two macro types of information should be captured when
applying motivation in an STS. The first relates to the motive being designed, i.e.
a rewarding system. This includes descriptors of rewards, the means to achieve
them, the data being collected and how they are stored to enable, amongst
other things, inferring those rewards. The second relates to the STS itself. This
includes the task to which motivation is being applied, the roles of the users
involved in the reward, and the management style.
Copyright © 2015 by the authors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
220
We also argue that the ad-hoc application of software-based motivation tech-
niques could have negative e↵ects such as isolation, clustering and stress and re-
sult in harms to the business goals and communication between constituent of an
STS. Hence, introducing software-based motivation requires a carefully planned
engineering process. We also illustrated compatibility issues amongst working
environment types, nature of rewards, and personality traits. Our argument is
supported by our initial results in [7].
Example. In a business environment, new sta↵ members usually go through
training sessions. These sessions are collaborative by nature. In order to evaluate
the progress of new sta↵, quizzes may be held and top scores are displayed in a
leader-board. While this may seem fine, our findings suggest that adding compet-
itive motive, the leader-board, to a collaborative task can increase tension and
put pressure on new sta↵ members and hinder the core training requirements.
Finally, we advocate the need to model motivation and its inter-relations
with the other requirements of an STS so that we can reason about properties
such as the alignment between the rewarding system and business requirements.
We plan to start with mainstream modelling languages for requirements of such
systems, e.g., goal models and business process models, and augment them with
a motivational layer. Such a systematic modelling of motivation as a separate
concern can aid developers to better manage and understand the possible im-
pacts of introducing software-based motivation. Our systematic approach will be
supported by a recommender system that will enable identification of proper mo-
tives in a given environment to better achieve requirements and, also, to predict
the side e↵ects of adding certain motives. The approach and the recommender
will also allow learning and adaptation to cater for changes in the business and
people’s perceptions of the reward and motivation techniques over time.
Acknowledgments. The research is supported by an FP7 Marie Curie CIG
grant (the SOCIAD project), Bournemouth University through the Fusion In-
vestment Fund and the Graduate School Santander Grant for PGR Development.
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(1981)
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