From Early to Late Requirements: A Goal-Based Approach

The Software Engineering community is placing increasing emphasis on understanding the organizational context of a new software system before its development. In this context, several research projects focus on mechanisms that facilitate the generation of a software system from early requirements specifications. However, none of these has proposed so far a systematic process for transforming an organizational model into a late requirements one. This paper presents a methodological approach to precisely this problem. In the proposed method, business goals constitute the basis for determining the relevant plans to be supported by the system-to-be. A pattern language is then used to systematically carry out the transformation from an organizational model into a late requirements model. The Tropos framework serves as baseline for this work. However, our work extends Tropos by proposing rules that support the model transformation process, thereby making organizational modeling an integral part of the software development process.