Eliciting and Capturing Business Goals to Inform a Product Line's Business Case and Architecture

Business goals constitute an important kind of knowledge for a software product line. They inform the product line's business case and they inform its architecture and quality attribute requirements. This paper establishes the connection between business goals and a product line's business case and architecture. It then presents a set of common business goal categories, gleaned from a systematic search of the business literature that can be used to elicit an organization's business goals from key stakeholders. Finally, it presents a well-defined method, which we have tried out in practice, for eliciting and capturing business goals and tying them to quality attribute requirements.

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