Dealing with Uncertainties in IT Solutions for Agriculture

Technology is essential for the improvement and efficiency of activities in the agricultural environment. Nevertheless, farmers and IT’s worlds are distant. Usually, IT services fail to provide the correct solution and farmers are reluctant to incorporate new IT advances. IT teams need to acquire agricultural knowledge and language in order to communicate, to reduce the distance, and cooperate. Nevertheless, during this process and particularly, in agriculture, there are many uncertainties. If they are not clearified, it will not be possible to provide the right IT solution. These uncertainties are translated as a lack of precision in the requirements specifications. Sometimes, it is as easy as elicit more information from the stakeholders to improve the specification. In some other situations, the stakeholders have different points of view and they need to reach a concensus. These uncertainties are hard to identify. IT teams and farmers must speak the same technical and specific language and the IT team needs a complete and exhaustive specification about how software applications must react. Agriculture is a biological environment with many rules and decisions that are not easy to make explicit. Therefore, it is important to involve a group of farmers as with complementary and different point of view. Thus, this article proposes an approach to deal with uncertainties in order to provide the unambiguous and complete specification. The approach relies on capturing knowledge through scenarios. It consists of three main steps to obtain the scenarios: (i) a collaborative knowledge acquisition, (ii) scenarios description and analysis, and (iii) group decision support.