Work Domain Analysis Workbench: Supporting Cognitive Work Analysis as a Systematic Practice

If cognitive engineering is to become accepted as part of engineering practice and to make contributions throughout the system life cycle, its concepts and techniques need to be clarified. Methods and criteria need to be available to ensure that an analysis is adequate. In this paper we focus on the prospects for Cognitive Work Analysis (Rasmussen et al., 1994; Vicente, 1999) to become more systematic and we hypothesize that software tools may help. We have developed a prototype software environment to support the first step in CWA, Work Domain Analysis. The Work Domain Analysis Workbench (WDAW) lets users enter, edit, visualise, manipulate, and query certain kinds of work domain structures. The WDAW supports discovery during analysis, facilitates creation of a work domain representation, and helps ensure analytic adequacy and consistency. We provide examples of the WDAW in use with existing data sets.