Compliance gaps: A requirements elicitation approach in the context of system evolution

Abstract

Eliciting change requirements in the context of system evolution is different from eliciting requirements for a system developed from scratch. Indeed, there is a system and documentation that should be referred to. Therefore, the issue is not only to identify new functions, but to uncover and understand differences with the current situation. There is few approaches that systematise the identification and documentation of such change requirements. Our approach is based on the analysis at the model level of the fitness relationship between the business and the system. Our experience showed us that another kind of change requirements could also be found when asking the question of continuity at the instance level. The literature already proposes so called "modification policies" that allow to manage current instances of the system workflows and business processes when their model evolve. However, these approaches are not interested in the elicitation of the requirements that relate to these modification policies, but to the technical solutions that these policies provide. The position taken in this paper is that change requirements can be elicited by analysing system evolutions through modification policies at the instance level. The paper proposes to document these requirements using the same approach as other change requirements. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.