Question

A team is working on a software system for managing the cost of public healthcare. Administrators and doctors are two primary groups of users of this system under development. Politicians are anxious both to control costs and to ensure that the best public image of the healthcare system is provided. There is a potential conflict in such a system between administrators who are driven by Treatment costs and doctors who are (or should be) driven by treatment effectiveness. Such a conflict of interests from different user groups is often called a “political factor” that the development team have to consider in requirement elicitation.

For example, administrators may ask for a feature that can allow an administrator to veto the treatment costs issued by doctors while doctors would not like the treatment proposals be rejected all the time. A compromise might be to grant administrators the veto privilege only when the treatment costs are above a certain level. This particular policy is thus included as part of the requirements for the system.

Instructions:

Follow the above example, describe another potential software system where some political factor can heavily affect the elicitation or prioritization of system

requirements. Your description should provide sufficient information, allowing readers to clearly see how the political factor might affect the determination of

system requirements.

Answer 1

In my perspective, there are many such systems on which there is political impact and here let me discuss about one particular topic.

That is education system!

If a team is working on education software system then there will be options like admissions, annual fees, book fee, and so on.

The main politics will pop up When it comes to admissions only.

Political impact is something which is not only done by politicians but also few higher authority does this.

The people who are well known for the higher authorities in the institution then those people will get admissions easily and it's popular with the term recommendations. Not only in education, but this happens in most of the other systems in day to day life and most of us have been impacted because of these recommendations.

Now a days the school fees or college fees is sitting on top of the hill and of many people can't afford that much but still they are paying. But for people with recommendations, the annual fees is reduced in high percentage which is totally unfair, because some people who can't afford to pay that much amount will be impacted more.