supporting human-intensive systems
Executing critical systems often rely on humans to make important and sometimes life-critical decisions. As such systems become more complex, the potential for human error to lead to system failures also increases. In the medical domain, for example, sophisticated technology has been introduced in the last decade without adequately considering the impact and role of the medical professionals. This is just one of many domains, where human agents, hardware devices, and software systems must interact with each other, and where humans are expected to make important, and sometime life-critical, decisions. This position paper argues that human-intensive systems should be a major concern of software engineering in the future and describes some of the research issues that need to be addressed.
human-intensive systems process improvement life-critical systems