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Clear justification of modeling decisions for goal-oriented requirements engineering

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Abstract

Representation and reasoning about goals of an information system unavoidably involve the transformation of unclear stakeholder requirements into an instance of a goal model. If the requirements engineer does not justify why one clear form of requirements is chosen over others, the subsequent modeling decisions cannot be justified either. If arguments for clarification and modeling decisions are instead explicit, justifiably appropriate instances of goal models can be constructed and additional analyses applied to discover richer sets of requirements. The paper proposes the “Goal Argumentation Method (GAM)” to fulfil three roles: (i) GAM guides argumentation and justification of modeling choices during the construction or critique of goal model instances; (ii) it enables the detection of deficient argumentation within goal model instances; and (iii) it provides practical techniques for the engineer to ensure that requirements appearing both in arguments and in model instance elements are clear.

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Notes

  1. No restrictions are placed on the way domain knowledge is represented—both informal and formal representations of stakeholders’ knowledge about the domain are allowed in \({{\mathcal{A}}}.\)

  2. Similar can be said for “day” in “same day” but the example focuses on “day minus one” only.

  3. The reader is reminded that the present work is not one focused on linguistics, so that no specific references will be given beyond overview and extensive discussions from the aforementioned field. For instance, no minority positions are mentioned herein. For details, the reader will refer to the works cited within the given references.

  4. It is, however, significant to note that the choice of derivation is critical if the aim is to build arguments automatically from a knowledge base: in case, e.g., arguments for requirements are to be obtained automatically from a knowledge base, the derived arguments will differ depending on the chosen derivation. It is obvious that following the above suggestions would require a knowledge base which contains defeasible rules.

  5. In the remainder, the subscript K will be omitted, since no knowledge base other than K (which is taken here to contain any knowledge that the stakeholders can provide) will be used.

  6. Note that the argument is extracted from the tree by ensuring minimality, according to Definition 6, so that some branches of the tree need not be maintained.

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Acknowledgments

The first author acknowledges funding from the Belgian ICM/CIM Doctoral Fellowship Program.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Management Research Unit (IMRU), University of Namur, 8, rempart de la vierge, 5000, Namur, Belgium

    Ivan J. Jureta & Stéphane Faulkner

  2. Institut d’Informatique, University of Namur, 21, Rue Grandgagnage, 5000, Namur, Belgium

    Pierre-Yves Schobbens

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  1. Ivan J. Jureta
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  2. Stéphane Faulkner
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  3. Pierre-Yves Schobbens
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Correspondence to Ivan J. Jureta.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this paper appears in Proceedings of the 14th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE’06).

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Jureta, I.J., Faulkner, S. & Schobbens, PY. Clear justification of modeling decisions for goal-oriented requirements engineering. Requirements Eng 13, 87–115 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-007-0056-y

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