Annotating Goals with Concerns in Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering

• DOI

Abstract

In goal-oriented requirements analysis, goals specify multiple concerns such as functions, strategies, and non-functions, and they are refined into sub goals from mixed views of these concerns. This intermixture of concerns in goals makes it difficult for a requirements analyst to understand and maintain goal refinements. Separating concerns and specifying them explicitly is one of the useful approaches to improve the understandability of goal refinements, i.e., the relations between goals and their sub goals. In this paper, we propose a technique to annotate goals with the concerns they have in order to support the understanding of goal refinement. In our approach, goals are refined into sub goals referring to the annotated concerns, and these concerns annotated to a goal and its sub goals provide the meaning of its goal refinement. By tracing and focusing on the annotated concerns, requirements analysts can understand goal refinements and modify unsuitable ones. We have developed a supporting tool and made an exploratory experiment to evaluate the usefulness of our approach.

Related papers

This work builds on

• International Conference Multi-Dimensional Goal Refinement in Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering ICSOFT-EA 2015

BibTeX

@incollection{hayashi-icsoft2015-ccis,
    author = {Shinpei Hayashi and Wataru Inoue and Haruhiko Kaiya and Motoshi Saeki},
    title = {Annotating Goals with Concerns in Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering},
    booktitle = {Software Technologies (Revised Selected Papers of ICSOFT 2015)},
    pages = {269--286},
    doi = {10.1007/978-3-319-30142-6_15},
    year = 2016,
}