UML Profile for modeling product observation

Nowadays interactive electronics products offer a huge functionality to prospective customers, but often it is too huge and complex to be grasped and used successfully. In this case, customers obviate the struggle and return the products to the shop. Also the variability in scope and features of a product is so large that an up-front specification becomes hard if not impossible. To avoid the problem of an inadequate match between customer expectations and designer assumptions, new sources of product usage information have to be developed. One possibility is to integrate observation functionality into the products, continuously involving real users in the product development process. The integration of such functionality is an often overlooked challenge that should be tackled with an appropriate engineering methodology. This paper presents on-going work about a novel design for observation approach that supports early observation integrations and enables the cooperation with various information stakeholders. We show how observation can be embedded seamlessly in a model-driven development process using UML. An industrial case-study shows the feasibility of the approach.