Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering

Web engineering software development is facing continuous changes in technology implementation. This involves analysts, developers and designers to provide extra effort in the design and maintenance of Web applications in order to adapt them to changes in requirements and implementation technologies. In this paper, a systematic review is presented in order to obtain, in a formal way, the current state-of-the-art about approaches for modeling, analysis and specification of Web engineering requirements, supported with a formal and well defined strategy.

The initial step of any software engineering methodology is to form requirements. Recently, a goal-oriented approach to requirements has been proposed and argued to be beneficial. Goals also play a key role in the implementation of proactive software agents. However, although some agent-oriented software engineering methodologies have incorporated (aspects of) goal-oriented requirements engineering, and although they target agent platforms that provide goals as an implementation construct, none of the methodologies provide a goal-oriented design process. We present three modifications to the Prometheus methodology which aim to make it more goal-oriented in its design phases: we introduce a goal coupling diagram, as an adjunct to the existing data coupling diagram; we modify the temporal design artefacts to include goals; and we introduce a number of goal-related consistency checks. Finally, we report on an experimental evaluation comparing the effectiveness of the original and refined methodologies.

The rise of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems has been a major event in the software industry and it became a solution for most enterprises to manage their data and business processes. Successful ERP implementations can reduce costs by improving efficiency then lead to improved company performance and better competitive edge. Despite these benefits and the age of ERP existing for several decades still high percentage of implementation failures are documented. ERP is packaged software designed by following the best practice from the specific industry to support typical business processes in the entire industrial field, it was designed by ERP vendors and used by the organization which implement it. Since the designer and user are two independent entity misalignments between user's needs and the software design are often happen. The misalignment define new specific requirements must be embedded into selected ERP. Requirement engineering (RE) is a main part and initial activity of software engineering concern about defines stakeholder requirements, needs and desire. Requirements engineering is the basis for efficient software implementation and quality management. Tools and theories which support RE in general are numerous nowadays; however, the task of providing a tools and theories that specializes in Requirements engineering for Enterprise resource planning systems has been addressed rarely. For that; this paper discusses modelling and verification of ERP functional requirements based on colored Petri nets (CPN) after evaluation of different Business process modelling techniques by using analytical hierarchy process (AHP). CPN considered one of powerful business process modelling techniques and using it help in stakeholder involvement and appropriate organization's business process representation. The nature of colored Petri nets that help in verification of internal completeness and consistency of ERP functional requirements model.

... Domain Analysis Requirement and Assumptions identification Classifying Modeling ElaborationConflict Identification and Resolution Prioritization Specification ... 4.4. Conflict Management Contributions among goals (positive or negative) can be modeled and managed. ...

Extraction transformation loading (ETL) processes play an increasingly important role for the support of modern business operations. These business processes are centred around artifacts with high variability and diverse lifecycles, which correspond to key business entities. The apparent complexity of these activities has been examined through the prism of business process management, mainly focusing on functional requirements and performance optimization. However, the quality dimension has not yet been thoroughly investigated, and there is a need for a more human-centric approach to bring them closer to business-users requirements. In this paper, we take a first step towards this direction by defining a sound model for ETL process quality characteristics and quantitative measures for each characteristic, based on existing literature. Our model shows dependencies among quality characteristics and can provide the basis for subsequent analysis using goal modeling techniques. We showca...

is an approach to requirements engineering dealing with intentionality in accordance with the relations among different actors. KAOS and i* (i-star) frameworks have been receiving many references as being important GORE proposals. This paper presents an conceptual analysis comparing characteristics of those methods giving examples related to actors' relations definition, goal organizational model, tasks representation, risk analysis, and non-functional requirements. The aim of this work is to show both frameworks benefits and drawbacks. We believe that this analysis helps the understanding of the core concepts of GORE as well as it draws attention to key representation issues for both KAOS and i*.

While traditional approaches in business process modeling tend to focus on "how" the business processes are performed (adopting a behavioral description in which business processes are described in terms of procedural aspects), in goal-oriented business process modeling, the proposals strive to extend traditional business process methodologies by providing a dimension of intentionality to business processes. One of the key difficulties in enabling one to model goaloriented processes concerns the identification or elicitation of goals. This paper reports on a case study conducted in a Brazilian hospital, in which we obtained several goal models represented in i*/Tropos, each of which corresponding to a business process also modeled in the scope of the study. We found NFR catalogues helpful in goal elicitation, uncovering goals that did not come up during previous interviews prior to these catalogues' use.

Essentially a software system's utility is determined by both its functionality and its non-functional characteristics, such as usability, flexibility, performance, interoperability and security. Nonetheless, there has been a lop-sided emphasis in the functionality of the software, even though the functionality is not useful or usable without the necessary non-functional characteristics. In this chapter, we review the state of the art on the treatment of non-functional requirements (hereafter, NFRs), while providing some prospects for future directions.

Goal-oriented methods have increasingly been recognised as an effective means for eliciting, elaborating, analysing and specifying software requirements. A key activity in these approaches is the elaboration of a correct and complete set of opertional requirements, in the form of pre-and trigger-conditions, that guarantee the system goals. Few existing approaches provide support for this crucial task and mainly rely on significant effort and expertise of the engineer.

is an approach to requirements engineering dealing with intentionality in accordance with the relations among different actors. KAOS and i* (i-star) frameworks have been receiving many references as being important GORE proposals. This paper presents an conceptual analysis comparing characteristics of those methods giving examples related to actors' relations definition, goal organizational model, tasks representation, risk analysis, and non-functional requirements. The aim of this work is to show both frameworks benefits and drawbacks. We believe that this analysis helps the understanding of the core concepts of GORE as well as it draws attention to key representation issues for both KAOS and i*.

Essentially a software system's utility is determined by both its functionality and its non-functional characteristics, such as usability, flexibility, performance, interoperability and security. Nonetheless, there has been a lop-sided emphasis in the functionality of the software, even though the functionality is not useful or usable without the necessary non-functional characteristics. In this chapter, we review the state of the art on the treatment of non-functional requirements (hereafter, NFRs), while providing some prospects for future directions.

The lack of a good understanding of customer needs within eservice initiatives caused severe financial losses in the Norwegian energy sector, resulting in the failure of e-service initiatives offering packages of independent services. One of the causes was a poor elicitation and understanding of the e-services at hand. In this paper, we propose an ontologically founded approach (1) to describe customer needs, and the necessary e-services that satisfy such needs, and (2) to bundle elementary e-services into needs-satisfying e-service bundles. The ontology as well as the associated reasoning mechanisms are codified in RDFS to enable software support for need elicitation and service bundling. A case study from the Norwegian energy sector is used to demonstrate how we put our theory into practice.

With most of formal methods, an initial formal model can be refined in multiple steps, until the final refinement contains enough details for an implementation. Most of the time, this initial model is built from the description obtained by the requirements analysis. Unfortunately, this transition from the requirements phase to the formal specification phase is one of the most painful steps and is still ambiguous. In fact, building this initial model requires a high level of competence and a lot of practice, especially as there is no well-defined process to assist designers. For that purpose, we propose a goalbased approach in which initial formal models (in Event-B) are built incrementally driven by a goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE) paradigm.

Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) approaches have been developed to facilitate the requirements engineers work by, for example, providing abstraction mechanisms to help eliciting and modeling requirements. One of the well-established GORE approaches is KAOS. Nevertheless, in largescale systems building KAOS models may result in incomplete and/or complex goal models, which are difficult to understand and change. This may lead to an increase in costs of product development and evolution. Thus, for large-scale systems, the effective management of complexity and completeness of goal models is vital. In this paper, we propose a metrics framework for supporting the quantitative assessment of complexity and completeness of KAOS goal models. Those metrics are formally specified, implemented and incorporated in a KAOS modeling tool. We validate the metrics with a set of real-world case studies and discuss the identified recurring modeling practices.

The use of Requirements at Runtime (RRT) is an emerging research area. Many methods and frameworks that make use of requirements models during software execution can be found in the literature. However, there is still a lack of a formal and explicit representation of what RRT are and what are the primary goals of their use. Still, most RRT proposals have their own modeling languages and ways to represent, specify and make use of requirements at runtime, thus resulting in a domain with overloaded concepts. In this paper, we intend to clarify the main notions involved in RRT, establishing an explicit common conceptualization regarding this domain. To do so, we need first to understand what software execution is, as well as what requirements are. Thus, we present three related domain ontologies: the Software Ontology (SwO), an ontology about software nature and execution, the Reference Software Requirements Ontology (RSRO), which addresses what requirements are and types of requirement...

The study of contemporary Requirements Engineering (RE) methodologies indicates that modeling of organizational goals constitutes a central activity of the RE process. In particular, goals provide the rationale and drive the elaboration of the requirements that operationalise them. They also provide the criteria against which the completeness and correctness of the requirements specification is validated. In other words, requirements implement goals in the same way that programs implement design specifications. Despite the significance of goals in RE, research in the field is fragmented. No research has so far taken place in order to define the overall role that goals play in RE. This paper puts forward a unifying view of goal analysis in the context of RE. This allows the identification of similarities and differences between the different conceptions of goal used by different approaches and promotes the understanding of the overall role of goal analysis in RE. Based on this understanding the various approaches can be put together thus leading to a stronger goal-driven RE framework that takes advantage of the contributions from the many streams of goal-oriented research.

A good understanding of the systems requirements has a high impact in the successful development of software products. Therefore, an appropriate requirements model must provide a comprehensive structure for what must be elicited, evaluated, specified, consolidated, and modified, instead of just providing facilities for software specifications. Since there is a well-known gap between requirements specifications and final software products, we propose the integration of Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) and Model-Driven Development (MDD) to solve this gap. The core of our proposal is comprised by a set of guidelines to automate the process of going from an initial i* model to a final software product by means of a precise model transformation process. Finally, we use a case study that is based on a photographic agency system in order to illustrate our approach.

The software agent paradigm has received considerable at- tention recently, both in research and industrial practice. However, adop- tion of this software paradigm remains elusive in software engineering practice. We claim that part of the adoption problem lies with the fact that mentalistic and social concepts underlying agents are subjective and complex for the average practitioner. Specifically, although there are many efforts related to the topic coming from philosophy, cogni- tive sciences and computer science, a uniform and well-founded semantic view on these concepts is currently lacking. This work extends an ex- isting upper-level ontology and offers it as a foundation for evaluating and designing agent-oriented modeling languages. In particular, the pa- per focuses on the concept of goal, aiming at disambiguating its defini- tion, discussing its different manifestations, and clarifying its relation to other important agent-related concepts. For that, we examine how goals are conceived and used according to some relevant literature on agent- orientation. In addition, related work on akin fields, especially philosophy and AI are used as a basis for the proposed ontological extensions.

Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) approaches have been developed to facilitate the requirements engineers work by, for example, providing abstraction mechanisms to help eliciting and modeling requirements. One of the well-established GORE approaches is KAOS. Nevertheless, in largescale systems building KAOS models may result in incomplete and/or complex goal models, which are difficult to understand and change. This may lead to an increase in costs of product development and evolution. Thus, for large-scale systems, the effective management of complexity and completeness of goal models is vital. In this paper, we propose a metrics framework for supporting the quantitative assessment of complexity and completeness of KAOS goal models. Those metrics are formally specified, implemented and incorporated in a KAOS modeling tool. We validate the metrics with a set of real-world case studies and discuss the identified recurring modeling practices.

While business processes and business goals are considered intrinsically interdependent, a comprehensive modeling approach that includes both the business process and the goal perspectives is still lacking. This paper proposes a semantic integration between the domains of goal modeling and business process modeling. We integrate the ARIS framework with the Tropos goal modeling language. While ARIS is widely employed for business process modeling, it offers an overly simplistic set of goal-related concepts. In contrast, Tropos offers a rich set of goal-related concepts (and associated goal analysis methods), while refraining from addressing business process modeling in detail. In order to investigate the relation between the Tropos modeling constructs and the ARIS elements, we propose an ontological account for both architectural domains through the usage of the UFO ontology.

Risk analysis is traditionally considered a critical activity for the whole software system's lifecycle. Risks are identified by considering technical aspects (e.g., failures of the system, unavailability of services, etc.) and handled by suitable countermeasures through a refined design. This, however, introduces the problem of reconsidering system requirements. In this paper, we propose a goal-oriented approach for analyzing risks during the requirements analysis phase. Risks are analyzed along with stakeholder interests, and then countermeasures are identified and introduced as part of the system's requirements. This work extends the Tropos goal modeling formal framework proposing new concepts, qualitative reasoning techniques, and methodological procedures. The approach is based on a conceptual framework composed of three main layers: assets, events, and treatments. We use ''loan origination process'' case study to illustrate the proposal, and we present and discuss experimental results obtained from the case study.

Abstract Feature Models encapsulate functionalities and quality properties of a product family. The employment of feature models for managing variability and commonality of large-scale product families raises an important question: on what basis should the features of a product family be selected for a target software application, which is going to be derived from the product family. Thus, the selection of the most suitable features for a specific application requires the understanding of its stakeholders' intentions and also the relationship ...

Actualmente, existen diversas metodologías que brindan soporte al desarrollo de RIAs haciendo énfasis en la etapa de desarrollo e implementación. Sin embargo, no consideran una etapa de análisis de requisitos específica para RIAs que resulta necesaria para poder determinar en etapas tempranas de desarrollo qué funcionalidades deben ser especificadas en el cliente dependiendo de los requisitos no funcionales que se quiera maximizar. Con la finalidad de paliar esta limitación, en este trabajo se presenta una ...

In goal-oriented requirements engineering methodologies, goals are structured into refinement trees from high-level system-wide goals down to fine-grained requirements assigned to specific software/ hardware/human agents that can realise them. Functional goals assigned to software agents need to be operationalised into specification of services that the agent should provide to realise those requirements. In this paper, we propose an approach for operationalising requirements into specifications expressed in the Event-B formalism. Our approach has the benefit of aiding software designers by bridging the gap between declarative requirements and operational system specifications in a rigorous manner, enabling powerful correctness proofs and allowing further refinements down to the implementation level. Our solution is based on verifying that a consistent Event-B machine exhibits properties corresponding to requirements.

Most goal-oriented modeling languages, including i*, Tropos, KAOS and the Goal-oriented Requirement Language (GRL), offer a graphical syntax, sometimes accompanied by a textual interchange format (e.g., in XML). Graph- ical representations of goal models excel at supporting discussions and at visu- alizing analysis results. However, creating/modifying goal models is often a te- dious task with current graphical environments. Textual languages are often more efficient for creating/ modifying models, in particular large ones. This pa- per proposes a programming-like textual syntax for GRL supported by an ad- vanced editor for the Eclipse platform. Such syntax and editor enable modelers to create GRL models with complex features (e.g., strategies and contribution overrides) in a way that is simpler than with the most popular GRL editor, namely jUCMNav. The paper also introduces a converter from the GRL textual syntax to jUCMNav, so that models can be visualized and analyzed.

AI systems that offer social services, such as healthcare ser- vices for patients, driving for travellers and war services for the military need to abide by ethical and professional principles and codes that apply for the services being offered. We propose to adopt Requirements En- gineering (RE) techniques developed over decades for software systems in order to elicit and analyze ethical requirements to derive functional and quality requirements that together make the system-to-be compliant with ethical principles and codes. We illustrate our proposal by sketching the process of requirements elicitation and analysis for driverless cars.

The success of software systems highly depends on user engagement. Thus, to deliver engaging systems, software has to be designed carefully taking into account Acceptance Requirements, such as " 70% of users will use the system " , and the psychological factors that could influence users to use the system. Analysis can then consider mechanisms that affect these factors, such as Gamification (making a game out of system use), advertising, incentives and more. We propose a Systematic Acceptance Requirements Analysis Framework based on Gamification for supporting the requirements engineer in analyzing and designing engaging software systems. Our framework, named Agon, encompasses both a methodology and a meta–model capturing acceptance and gamification knowledge. In this paper, we describe the Agon Meta–Model and provide examples from the gamification of a decision– making platform in the context of a European Project.

MASRML-Multi-Agent Systems Requirements Modeling Languageis a UML-based Domain-Specific Modeling Language conceived for the requirements modeling in multi-agent system projects. Along this work the extended metamodel developed to support the language is described and the applicability of this DSML in the requirements identification of a multi-agent system is demonstrated using the new mechanisms produced to model specific functional requirements for this kind of system. This work also includes how the DSML was validated and the impressions collected during the validations.

AI systems that offer social services, such as healthcare ser- vices for patients, driving for travellers and war services for the military need to abide by ethical and professional principles and codes that apply for the services being offered. We propose to adopt Requirements En- gineering (RE) techniques developed over decades for software systems in order to elicit and analyze ethical requirements to derive functional and quality requirements that together make the system-to-be compliant with ethical principles and codes. We illustrate our proposal by sketching the process of requirements elicitation and analysis for driverless cars.

A data warehouse (DW) system stores data from multiple data sources in integrated form and provides capabilities for monitoring business operations to ensure compliance to strategic goals. As such, DWs constitute a fundamental building block for Business Intelligence (BI) operations. In this paper, we introduce the notion of Awareness Requirements (AwReqs) in the requirements analysis and elicitation phase for DWs. In this context, AwReqs provide analysts with the means for eliciting and modeling requirements ...

Non-functional requirements (NFRs) have been the focus of research in Requirements Engineering (RE) for more than 20 years. Despite this attention, their ontological nature is still an open question, thereby hampering efforts to develop concepts, tools and techniques for eliciting, modeling, and analyzing them, in order to produce a specification for a system-to-be. In this paper, we propose to treat NFRs as qualities, based on definitions of the UFO foundational ontology. Furthermore, based on these ontological definitions, we provide guidelines for distinguishing between non-functional and functional requirements, and sketch a syntax of a specification language that can be used for capturing NFRs.

Representation and reasoning about goals of an information system unavoidably involve the transformation of unclear stakeholder requirements into an instance of a goal model. If the requirements engineer does not justify why one clear form of requirements is chosen over others, the subsequent modeling decisions cannot be justified either. If arguments for clarification and modeling decisions are instead explicit, justifiably appropriate instances of goal models can be constructed and additional analyses applied to discover richer sets of requirements. The paper proposes the "Goal Argumentation Method (GAM)" to fulfil three roles: (i) GAM guides argumentation and justification of modeling choices during the construction or critique of goal model instances; (ii) it enables the detection of deficient argumentation within goal model instances; and (iii) it provides practical techniques for the engineer to ensure that requirements appearing both in arguments and in model instance elements is clear.

Requirements Engineering is a sub discipline of Software Engineering, which is an important and vital phase in the overall software engineering life cycle. Software as a final product is deemed to fail if it does not fulfill the needs of its users. A number of contributions have been made to refine the requirements engineering process. Most of them attempted to link requirements to goals. This new trend is called as Goal-Oriented Requirement Engineering (GORE). A number of goal-oriented RE methods have been subsequently derived by various researches. This paper reviews some of the significant research works done in GORE. The comparative study may serve as a guide for readers to select an appropriate goal-oriented technique for fulfilling his/her requirements engineering needs.

The demand for multi-application smart card platform has been increasing in various business sectors recently. When it comes to the actual implementation of the platform, however, network-based dynamic downloading in a Card Issuer-Service Provider separated environment has not made much progress. This paper introduces the smart card information sharing platform that uses licensing/policy/profile management and PKIbased technologies to enable multiple CIs and multiple SPs to reflect their own business policy flexibly via network. It makes the paradigm shift from card-oriented scheme to service-oriented scheme. By through world's first implementation of the scheme and some experiments including deployment, we confirmed that this technology is well-accepted and applicable to various business sectors and it can be of practical use.

Requirements engineering is concerned with the elicitation of high-level goals to be achieved by the envisioned system, the refinement of such goals and their operationalization into specifications of services and constraints, and the assignment of responsibilities for the resulting requirements to agents such as humans, devices, and software. Requirements engineering processes often result in goals, requirements and assumptions about agent behavior that are too ideal; some of them are likely to be not satisfied from time to time in the running system due to unexpected agent behavior. The lack of anticipation of exceptional behaviors results in unrealistic, unachievable and/or incomplete requirements. As a consequence, the software developed from those requirements will not be robust enough and will inevitably result in poor performance or failures, sometimes with critical consequences on the environment. The paper presents formal techniques for reasoning about obstacles to the satisfaction of goals, requirements, and assumptions elaborated in the requirements engineering process. A first set of techniques allow obstacles to be generated systematically from goal formulations and domain properties. A second set of techniques allow resolutions to be generated once the obstacles have been identified thereby. Our techniques are based on a temporal logic formalization of goals and domain properties; they are integrated into an existing method for goal-oriented requirements elaboration with the aim of deriving more realistic, complete and robust requirements specifications.

Goal-oriented methods are increasingly popular for elaborating software requirements. They offer systematic support for incrementally building intentional, structural and operational models of the software and its environment. They also provide various techniques for early analysis, notably, to manage conflicting goals or anticipate abnormal environment behaviors that prevent goals from being achieved. On the other hand, tabular event-based methods are well-established for specifying operational requirements for control software. They provide sophisticated techniques and tools for late analysis of software behavior models through simulation, model checking or table exhaustiveness checks. The paper proposes to take the best out of these two worlds to engineer requirements for control software. It presents a technique for deriving event-based specifications, written in the SCR tabular language, from operational specifications built according to the KAOS goal-oriented method. The technique consists in a series of transformation steps each of which resolves semantic, structural or syntactic differences between the KAOS source language and the SCR target language. Some of these steps need human intervention and illustrate the kind of semantic subtleties that need to be taken into account when integrating multiple formalisms. As a result of our technique SCR specifiers may use upstream goal-based processes à la KAOS for the incremental elaboration, early analysis, organization and documentation of their tables while KAOS modelers may use downstream tables à la SCR for later analysis of the behavior models derived from goal specifications.

The KAOS framework aims to avoid eliciting ambiguous or irrelevant requirements and allows efficient and easy communication between stakeholders. Nevertheless, KAOS is designed mainly for requirements engineers, not so much for other important stakeholders, that understand better other kinds of models, such as mind maps. Thus, this paper proposes an approach for generating KAOS goal models from mind maps by adopting model-driven techniques. The use of mind maps, as a creative and agile requirements technique, aims to encourage the construction of KAOS goal models more effectively and in a simpler way by involving all kinds of stakeholders that do need to know about KAOS. Our approach also contains the definition of a systematic process and is applied to an industrial case application.

Due to the dynamic nature of the Web as well as its heterogeneous audience, web applications are more likely to rapidly evolve leading to inconsistencies among requirements during the development process. With the purpose to deal with these inconsistencies, web developers need to know dependencies among requirements considering that the understanding of these dependencies helps in better managing and maintaining web applications. In this paper, an algorithm has been defined and implemented in order to analyze dependencies among functional and nonfunctional requirements (in a goal-oriented approach) for understanding which is the impact derived from a change during the Model-Driven Web Engineering process. This Impact Analysis would support web developer in selecting requirements to be implemented ensuring that web applications finally satisfy the audience.