Supporting requirements elicitation through goal/scenario coupling

Abstract

Goals have long been recognized to be an essential component involved in the Requirements Engineering (RE) process. They have proved to be an effective way to support a number of requirements engineering activities such as requirements elicitation, systematic exploration of design choices, checking requirements completeness, ensuring requirements pre-traceability and helping in the detection of threats, conflicts, obstacles and their resolution. The leading role played by goals in the RE process led to a whole stream of research on goal modeling, goal specification/formulation and goal-based reasoning for the multiple aforementioned purposes. On the other hand, there is evidence that dealing with goal is not an easy task and presents a number of difficulties in practice. To overcome these difficulties, many authors suggest combining goals and scenarios. The reason is that they complement each other: there is a mutual mitigation of difficulties encountered with one by using the other. The paper reviews various research efforts undertaken in this line of research. It uses L'Ecritoire, an approach that guides the requirements elicitation and specification process through interleaved goal modelling and scenario authoring to illustrate the combined use of goals and scenarios to reason about requirements for the system To-Be. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.