Extreme Requirements Elicitation: Lessons Learnt from the COVID-19 Case Study

[Context and motivation] The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the general unpreparedness of the research community to face biological data challenges in a timely manner. In these dramatic times, healthcare providers and virology researchers would have largely benefited from sound support from the information systems and database communities, able to produce systems that allow to explore data, compute statistics, and discover knowledge on the virus. [Question/problem] The research progress in emergency times is hindered by the lack of experience in organizing effective interaction between parties, possibly supported by specific tools. Streamlining the domain knowledge exchange through an appropriate requirement engineering practice is of paramount importance, not only in health crises but also in disaster management and cases of extreme weather hazards. [Principal ideas/results] To this end, we report on the lessons learnt by applying an agile interviewing method during the COVID-19 outbreak, involving several experts spanning from clinicians and geneticists, to biologists and virologists. We have preliminarily tested our approach for the creation of an integrative database and a search system for viral sequences; foreseen extensions of the system target visualization, question-driven data warehousing, and statistical reporting. [Contribution] We present a number of practical suggestions aimed at conducting interviews under extreme conditions, where the conventional requirement elicitation methods are not applicable. Specifically, our proposal lays the foundations to i) address the complexity of Extreme Requirements Elicitation (ERE) sessions in the context of interdisciplinary fields; ii) design timeliness-critical systems, essential to fight pandemics.