Defining goals in a COTS‐aware requirements engineering approach

The goals of developing systems better, faster, and cheaper continue to drive software engineering practitioners and researchers to investigate software engineering methodologies. In requirements engineering, the focus has traditionally been on modeling the software engineering process and products for systems that are being built from scratch. As the size and complexity of systems continues to grow the use of commercial off the shelf (COTS) components is being viewed as a solution. Effective use of COTS components, however, requires a systematic approach that provides both a set of concepts for modeling the subject matter and a set of guidelines for using such concepts. In particular, the process needs to recognize and address the people oriented problems including the identification and resolution of conflicting goals, bridging the gaps between stated requirements and “approximately fitting” components while still satisfying the customer. In this paper, we present a goal and agent oriented requirements engineering process model that explicitly addresses the use of COTS components. More specifically, we present (part of) our model for a COTS‐Aware Requirements Engineering (CARE) process and illustrate it using a Digital Library System (DLS). © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Syst Eng 7: 61–83, 2004

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