Constructing a goal model from requirements descriptions based on extraction rules

Abstract

A goal model, which is one of the common requirements models, has advantages of formalizing and visualizing results of requirements analysis. The model regards a requirement as a goal, and the root goal that is achieved by system execution should be decomposed to precondition goals. Current systems are large and complexed, so that there are a lot of requirements to be implemented. Therefore it is difficult to extract all goals and construct an elaborated goal model manually. In this paper we propose a process to support constructing goal models from requirements descriptions written in a natural language. In the proposed process, extraction rules are used to extract goals from requirements descriptions and then to construct a goal model from the goals. To evaluate our process, we applied the process to two system descriptions to construct goal models. The results show that the proposed process extracted appropriate goals and successfully assembled these goals in a goal hierarchy. We also report preliminary results of automating the proposed process.