Integrated process oriented requirements management

Abstract

Within current software development projects requirements are usually derived from a technical point of view. Since these systems are part of an already existing enterprise environment and their goal is to support business processes, the focus should be shifted towards these overlaying business processes. Therefore we propose a holistic method that focuses on business processes and using them as a vantage point from which requirements are elicitated and linked to them. Based on these interconnected dependencies, functional requirements without a business relation can be identified. Furthermore, this also allows identifying aspects that are not yet covered by any requirements as well as process-oriented monitoring throughout all project phases. Existing business process management tools were extended to incorporate this method which was successfully applied within a software development project in a large, international company.