Where Did the Requirements Come from? A Retrospective Case Study

Understanding complex organisations in terms of their stakeholders' goals, intentions and resources, is a necessary condition for the design of present day socio-technical systems. Goal-oriented approaches in requirements engineering provide concepts and techniques to support this analysis. A variety of goal-oriented modelling methods are available, together with guidelines for their application, as well as real case studies success stories. Our long term research objective is to derive useful suggestions for practitioners about which information sources are more promising for performing effective goal-oriented analysis and requirements elicitation of a complex domain, as well as about possible limits and pitfalls. As a first step towards this objective we perform a retrospective case study analysis of a project in the domain of ambient assisted-living residences for people affected by Alzheimer's. In this paper we describe the design of this study, present an analysis of the collected data, and discuss them against the proposed research questions, towards investigating the effectiveness of information sources for goal modelling and requirements elicitation in complex domains.