31st International Conference on Software Engineering

Tutorial on Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering

Vancouver, Canada, May 16-24, 2009

Authors:
Jaelson Castro, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco - UFPE, Brazil;
Eric Yu, University of Toronto, Canada;
Neil Maiden, City University, United Kingdom

Held on: Tuesday the 19th (morning and afternoon)

Abstract:
Growing experience with Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering GORE has shown that goals are among the key forces for requirements elicitation, modelling, analysis and evolution. Goals capture stakeholder purposes which are related to functional and non-functional requirements. This tutorial reviews the history of ideas and research related to GORE, providing a review of some well-known techniques such as NFR, GBRAM and KAOS, and giving special emphasis on i*.
In particular, we show that understanding the social and organizational context is critical to the success of many systems today. By explicitly modelling and analyzing strategic relationships among multiple actors, the i* approach incorporates rudimentary social analysis into a systems analysis and design framework. Actors depend on each other for goals to be achieved, tasks to be performed, and resources to be furnished. A notion of softgoal is used to deal systematically with quality attributes, or non-functional requirements. Dependencies among actors give rise to opportunities as well as vulnerabilities. Networks of dependencies are analyzed using a qualitative reasoning procedure. During systems design, actors explore alternative configurations of dependencies to assess their strategic positioning in a multi-agent, social context. GRL, a version of i*, is part of the new ITU-T Z.151 international standard. This tutorial will introduce, explain and demonstrate the i* framework with examples, and describe how to use it during the early stages of the requirements process.
Attend this tutorial if you are a Practicing Requirements Engineer who wants to learn goal oriented techniques, an Academic who wants to explore how goal orientation fits into requirements engineering, or a Project leader and Manager who wants to understand how goals can be part of the requirements process.

Invited Speakers:
Daniel Amyot, University of Ottawa, Canada
• Goal-oriented Requirement Language (GRL) and its Applications
Xavier Franch, UPC Barcelona, Spain
• Using i* for OTS Software Component Selection
Anna Perini, FBK IRST, Italy
• Understanding the Requirements of a Decision Support System for Integrated Production in Agriculture