Modelling politics in requirements engineering: adding emoji to existing notations

TL;DR

This paper proposes using emoji pictograms within UML and organizational charts to help requirements engineers visualize and manage the political and emotional dimensions of organizational requirements, enhancing communication and reflection.

Contribution

It introduces a pragmatic approach to incorporate political aspects into requirements models using universally recognizable emoji symbols, without adding new notation.

Findings

Emoji can effectively represent political and emotional information in models.

The approach facilitates better communication and understanding of organizational politics.

Examples demonstrate practical application of emoji in UML and organizational charts.

Abstract

Notwithstanding several authors have recognised the conceptual key of "politics" as an important component in any Require-ments Engineering (RE) process, practitioners still lack a prag-matic answer on how to deal with the political dimension: such an ability has become a mostly desirable but totally undetailed part of what we usually and vaguely refer to as "professional experience". Nor were practitioners given any suitable tool or method to easily detect, represent, control and if possible leverage politics. Authors argue that this issue could be successfully ad-dressed and resolved if, when we map organisations against the system to be developed, we include power and politics in their "too human" and even emotional dimension. A simple way to do so is to use emoji pictograms: most of them are part of a universal language, which requirements engineers could easily adopt and exploit to assess and produce models that include an extra layer of "political" information, without the need to actually introduce any new notation. A few examples of emoji-aware UML and organisational charts are hereby proposed, more as a platform to support communication and share reflections on how to deal with politics than as an actual technology to be adopted.