Combining goal-oriented and problem-oriented requirements engineering methods

Abstract

Several requirements engineering methods exist that differ in their abstraction level and in their view on the system-to-be. Two fundamentally different classes of requirements engineering methods are goal- and problem-based methods. Goal-based methods analyze the goals of stakeholders towards the system-to-be. Problem-based methods focus on decomposing the development problem into simple sub-problems. Goal-based methods use a higher abstraction level that consider only the parts of a system that are relevant for a goal and provide the means to analyze and solve goal conflicts. Problem-based methods use a lower abstraction level that describes the entire system-to-be. A combination of these methods enables a seamless software development, which considers stakeholders' goals and a comprehensive view on the system-to-be at the requirements level. We propose a requirements engineering method that combines the goal-based method SI* and the problem-based method Problem Frames. We propose to analyze the issues between different goals of stakeholders first using the SI* method. Our method provides the means to use the resulting SI*models as input for the problem frame method. These Problem Frame models can be refined into architectures using existing research. Thus, we provide a combined requirements engineering method that considers all stakeholder views and provides a detailed system specification. We illustrate our method using an E-Health example. © 2013 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.