Goal Model Integration: Advanced Relationships and Rationales Documentation

Abstract

Integrating new technology in a business environment raises many challenges such as ensuring that this technology meets stakeholder requirements and contributes to organizational goals. However, before analyzing the impact of technology on requirements and goals, goal models of the current context and of the proposed technology should be merged to reflect the whole context. Existing merging approaches mainly focus on merging partial views of a goal model, which belong to one context. However, merging different goal models to reflect one holistic context, such as in technology integration, is not addressed. This paper presents a Goal Integration Method targeting different initial contexts, enabling completeness and consistency analysis of the integrated goal model, and providing traceability to rationales and decisions made at integration time. The method introduces advanced relationships and procedures to capture newly added elements or raised conflicts that may occur during the integration. The method is presented with the help of a conceptual model and an algorithm. It also exploits the User Requirements Notation with tool support (jUCMNav) for building and integrating goal models. The feasibility of the method is illustrated through a case study. The method formalizes the integration of multiple goal models belonging to different contexts, and the accommodation of new requirements, while providing comprehensive traceability and rationales.