People today use the computer for many simultaneous work projects and activities. The traditional file system was developed for storing and retrieving files and it and the desktop have not evolved with users' practices. The first part of the dissertation presents a user study that generates a better understanding of the issues and practices regarding the organization of documents in support of activities. The second part provides the design of an environment to organize information based on an activity paradigm as opposed to an archiving paradigm and delivers the instantiation and the evaluation of a system based on such a design. The system, called Docksy, provides an environment structured in workspaces. Each workspace is segmented in areas or panels. Users can use documents as elements to structure their workflow or to manage their activities by separating files in the different panels, and by adding comments, tags, and flags. The Docksy design aims to create a flexible, lightweight environment that is easy to use and can be incorporated into users' daily practice, old or new. Such a system could be used to learn about users' practices and their evolution. Docksy was therefore developed for a double purpose; the short term purpose of testing new features (panels, comments, flags, and tags) and the long term purpose of facilitating learning about user practices. A study of Docksy use was conducted in which twenty participants used Docksy for at least two weeks and they were then interviewed. The study showed that participants valued the panels and the comment features. The results of the study showed the potential for changing users' practice and the potential for the system to be adopted by users.

<p>Requirements Engineering (RE) is nowadays considered to be an activity, that aims at supporting the whole lifecycle of an information system by: eliciting, documenting, validating, and managing the requirements of the system. This thesis aims at providing an overview of the area of Requirements Management (RM) and to identify important and interesting issues or areas where further research is needed.</p><p>RM includes two major areas; organising requirements and requirements change management. Organising requirements is concerned with structuring the requirements and storing additional relevant information about them e.g. attributes and traceability information. Requirements change management is concerned with dealing with changing requirement in a systematic way i.e. making informed decisions whether to implement a certain change or not, and support the implementation of approved changes.</p><p>In order to provided a broader view of RM, the literature study were complemented by an interview study of how RM is conducted in practice. This interview study shows that the effort resources spent on RM differs substantially between different organisations. Various reasons for these discrepancies are elaborated in the work, but one of the main reasons are the type of software development that is conducted in the organisation. There is a tendency that organisations that develop software products and continuously releases new versions of there products are more likely to spend resources on RM, compared with organisations that develop customers specific solutions in one shoot projects. The need to reuse requirements and knowledge, as well as the maturity of the RE/RM process, are other factors that affects the resources spent on RM. The RM activities performed in practice are concordant with the activities found in literature.</p><p>A number of areas where further research is needed were identified: requirements change management, dependencies between requirements, RM tools, and information management</p>

Requirements Engineering (RE) is nowadays considered to be an activity, that aims at supporting the whole lifecycle of an information system by: eliciting, documenting, validating, and managing the requirements of the system. This thesis aims at providing an overview of the area of Requirements Management (RM) and to identify important and interesting issues or areas where further research is needed. RM includes two major areas; organising requirements and requirements change management. Organising requirements is concerned with structuring the requirements and storing additional relevant information about them e.g. attributes and traceability information. Requirements change management is concerned with dealing with changing requirement in a systematic way i.e. making informed decisions whether to implement a certain change or not, and support the implementation of approved changes. In order to provided a broader view of RM, the literature study were complemented by an interview study of how RM is conducted in practice. This interview study shows that the effort resources spent on RM differs substantially between different organisations. Various reasons for these discrepancies are elaborated in the work, but one of the main reasons are the type of software development that is conducted in the organisation. There is a tendency that organisations that develop software products and continuously releases new versions of there products are more likely to spend resources on RM, compared with organisations that develop customers specific solutions in one shoot projects. The need to reuse requirements and knowledge, as well as the maturity of the RE/RM process, are other factors that affects the resources spent on RM. The RM activities performed in practice are concordant with the activities found in literature. A number of areas where further research is needed were identified: requirements change management, dependencies between requirements, RM tools, and information management