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Eugenio MAURI 10/03/2011 MSIC JB 2011 (UE02 - Ingnierie des exigences)

Summary of the article Reasoning with goals to engineer requirements (Colette Rolland)

In this article the author gives an overview of various researches on the subject of goal-driven approaches, oriented to requirements engineering field. She focuses on the LEcritoire approach to present the state of the art and starts by reminding that all goal driven approaches, ultimately, aim at building purposeful system requirements that meet their users expectations but also the objectives of different stakeholders. Researches pointed out that since requirements arise from the subject world (e.g.: the part of the world on which to provide information) the usage world (e.g.: agents procedures) and the system world (e.g.: the world dictated by system specifications where requirements coming from the other two worlds must take place) the relationships that link these systems define different types of requirements. The representation relationship (between subject and system world) address domain-imposed requirements while intentional relationship (between usage world and system world) address user-defined requirements. Since the latter explains why the system is developed (therefore is the link between the system and the goals and objectives of the organisation.) all goaldriven approaches focus on it. As the author says, this point is quite important since, throughout the whole article, she stresses the fact that the real purpose of building a system is not to be found inside the system itself but in the enterprise, which means in a more global context and that all goal-driven approaches focus on the intentional relationship. The reading goes on by illustrating some of the advantages of focusing on goals, such as goals refinement (for exploration of choices), requirements pretraceability and justification to stakeholders, conflicts detection, etc.. On the other hand, an overview of drawbacks and issues is also given: problems mentioned are those such as the definition of the goal concept itself, or the fact that sometimes systems are build with not precise goals in mind, or the fact that sometimes goals are idealized or not complete or the fact that goal decomposition can be tricky. An insight is given to the LEcritoire approach to see how it deals with the above issues in order to elicit, specify and document requirements. LEcritoire is a tool that produces a requirement document by coupling goals and scenarios (described as one ore more actions describing a path from two states of agents) derived by analysing textual scenarios. The couple goal-scenario (named requirement chunk) is the central point if this approach and represent a possible way to achieve a given goal. By moving from

goals to scenarios, and vice versa, this approach allows for both goals discovery and requirements elicitation process. The author then goes a bit into details concerning the mechanism on which goal formulation is based inside the LEcritoire tool: a combinations of verbs and parameters that can designate a mean, a manner, an agent, etc This in order to quickly introduce the concepts of informal, semi-formal and formal specifications and the reasons behind them (e.g.: automatic analysis) and skim through some other existing tool and approaches, such as Kaos or Electra. The concept of composition, alternative and refinements are also detailed, and the resulting structure organised in AND, OR and different granularities is presented. A brief panoramic of some possible relationships between goals follows, showing the possibility for conflict and positive/negative influence. Relationship between goals and agents is also sketched, and also between other entities, such as problems, opportunities, threads or obstacles. The concept of abstractions is presented, with its different types (behavioural, functional, physical) defining goals at different levels (e.g.: from strategic to technical). Finally, goal discovery and scenario authoring strategies are presented but the article goes into details only on the discovery rules implemented by LEcritoire (pointing the reader few other papers that go deeper into the scenario authoring part); an example of a rule is illustrated, based on refinement strategy and the WHY/WHAT IF and HOW techniques are also mentioned. Few references to other papers on different way to approach this aspect are given to the reader. In the end the author summarizes all the benefit from goal-driven RE that lead to the rationale to the system to be built. As a conclusion of the article, the author tries to quickly summarise all the advantages brought by goal-driven RE, namely: provide the rationale for the system to be built, provide a link between the system and the context, facilitate business changing translation into features of the system, highlight choices and alternatives, help finding requirements, facilitates mapping between goals and specs, facilitates goals negotiation, helps finding conflicts and fixing them. Some other advantages are also possible and the author points the reader to some other papers that give more details about them.

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