It has been known through various surveys that Information Systems (IS) projects imperfection and failures are mainly due to a misapprehension of such systems requirements. An appropriate way of doing requirements engineering (RE) should dig different stakeholders’ objectives and activities carried out by them to reach those goals. Thus, IS will no longer be only technically good but also purposeful and of quality. This view of RE process which focuses on goal centric activities is the “goal-driven requirements engineering”.
This focus on goals can be explained by the ability of goal modeling to ensure efficient requirements elicitation, completeness and pre-traceability. It also helps in terms of exploration of systems choices, detection and resolution of conflicts that may arise from multiple viewpoints provided by stakeholders. All these can be performed by answering to the following set of inquiries: Why is a determined functionality or constraint needed or not? Are the elicited requirements enough to achieve the goal they promote? Where does each requirement originate from and how to track changes it undergoes? What different ways of satisfying a given goal exit?
In order to make the goal-driven RE more efficient, some key issues have been raised by different approaches while trying to support the process. For instance, to automate goal analysis, efforts have been undertaken in terms of formalizing or semi-formalizing goals formulation. Propositions have also been made to match goals with scenario in order to make them more concrete, more illustrative with respect to undertaken actions by systems’ agents. Additionally, in pursuance of supporting a better understanding of goals, the notions of relationship and levels of abstraction have been introduced. Thus, goals can be distilled in either more or alternative sub-goals; they can also be influencing one another or straightforwardly be conflicting. Obviously, top level goals also known as business objectives linking to low level ones or systems requirements should then arise. “L’ECRITOIRE”[1], a goal-based approach to RE addresses all these issues.
An abstract by Lookman SANNI
Author: Colette ROLLAND
[1]: http://crinfo.univ-paris1.fr/CREWS/Process/chunk19_index.html