The Business Process Management lifecycle involves identifying, analysing and evolving the design of an organisation’s tasks. Modelling plays a key role in those activities to capture the processes but also the related goals representing the rationale behind them. While some mappings have been defined between such models, they lack guidelines to support analysis or (re)design activities in order to improve processes in an evolving organisation. The purpose of this paper is to propose a two-staged guidance: (1) a lightweight approach leaving the goal model implicit but using goal reasoning techniques; and (2) an heavier approach where an explicit goal model is explicitly built and mapped to support the redesign process. Our work is experimented on a running case study inspired from a logistics system. Although still in progress, we were able to uncover interesting problems and to suggest relevant redesigns.

Systematising requirements reuse is a key step to raise the efficiency and maturity level in Requirements Engineering (RE), which is even better when centred on a repository of common artefacts like templates and patterns that allow people to build and share a strong reference framework. The aim of this tool demo is to show how to deploy an approach combining a local library for each analyst and a more controlled shared library. We show how to implement a library on a model-based RE tool and illustrate key scenarios related to the identification, publication, search and instantiation of requirements templates and patterns.

Requirements Engineering (RE) tools and more generally the whole Software Engineering toolchain follow the strong trend towards web-based interface. This allows the analyst to use their tools in a "Software as a Service" mode either from a local company server or directly in the Cloud. Such deployments also ease toolchain integration by connecting their respective API through secured web-services, possibly using specific software lifecycle interoperability standards. In this tool demonstration, we illustrate the results of the rewrite process of a major Requirements Engineering tool towards this purpose. Our tooling has the following key features: (i) it supports rich requirements models based on goal-oriented RE, (ii) it is implemented as a collaborative concept server based on Eclipse Modelling technology and (iii) it exposes a REST interface supporting model building, diagram edition, history retrieval, snapshot management, collaborative mode, user authentication and project management. The following scenarios will be demonstrated (1) collaborative edition of a shared RE model, (2) rich service composition with application lifecycle management tools and (3) easy web-component integration in third-party web interfaces.

Goal-Orientation provides a rich framework for reasoning about systems during the Requirements Engineering (RE) phase. While critical properties like safety or security can require formal semantics, performing quantitative reasoning on semi-formal models in a much more lightweight approach reveals to be sufficient in many projects. Most of the time, existing RE tools only target specific quantification scenarios or do not provide easy mechanisms for implementing them. In order to demonstrate the ability to provide mechanisms that are both generic and powerful, we developed an extension of the Objectiver tool in three directions: (1) internal reasoning capabilities on AND-OR goal/obstacles structures, (2) close integration with an external spreadsheet application and (3) model export for building assessment tools using model-driven engineering techniques. We also demonstrate how our approach can cope with a variety of industrial scenarios requiring some form of quantification such as risk analysis, selection of design alternatives, effort estimation, and assessment of customer satisfaction.

Software engineering tools currently available on the market are focused on solution design rather than on problem description. So-called requirement engineering (RE) tools enable companies to manage their requirements only once they got them out. But poor requirements, even well managed, will cause projects to fail. The presentation shows how CEDITI engineers proceed to produce requirements documents with GRAIL, a tool designed by RE practitioners for RE practitioners to enable them to do real requirements engineering. The tool relies on KAOS, the goal-driven requirements methodology. KAOS (Dardenne et al., 1993) advocates for modelling problems in the same flavor as engineers build models to describe solutions but with an appropriate ontology and notation.

A wide range of inconsistencies can arise during requirements engineering as goals and requirements are elicited from multiple stakeholders. Resolving such inconsistencies sooner or later in the process is a necessary condition for successful development of the software implementing those requirements. The paper first reviews the main types of inconsistency that can arise during requirements elaboration, defining them in an integrated framework and exploring their interrelationships. It then concentrates on the specific case of conflicting formulations of goals and requirements among different stakeholder viewpoints or within a single viewpoint. A frequent, weaker form of conflict called divergence is introduced and studied in depth. Formal techniques and heuristics are proposed for detecting conflicts and divergences from specifications of goals/requirements and of domain properties. Various techniques are then discussed for resolving conflicts and divergences systematically by the introduction of new goals or by transforming the specifications of goals/objects toward conflict-free versions. Numerous examples are given throughout the paper to illustrate the practical relevance of the concepts and techniques presented. The latter are discussed in the framework of the KAOS methodology for goal-driven requirements engineering.

No abstract available.

The KAOS methodology provides a language, a method, and meta-level knowledge for goal-driven requirements elaboration. The language provides a rich ontology for capturing requirements in terms of goals, constraints, objects, actions, agents etc. Links between requirements are represented its well to capture refinements, conflicts, operationalizations, responsibility assignments, etc. The KAOS specification language is a multi-paradigm language with a two-level structure: an outer semantic net layer for declaring concepts, their attributes and links to other concepts, and an inner formal assertion layer for formally defining the concept. The latter combines a real-time temporal logic for the specification of goals, constraints, and objects, and standard pre-/postconditions for the specification of actions and their strengthening to ensure the constraints.

Advocates a process-oriented approach to reusing operational requirements. In process-oriented approaches, a development (and reuse is just a particular case of development) keeps track of the intermediate states and the steps leading to the final artifacts. This paper shows that it is worth recording the reuse process for developing the operational requirements and not just the final product artifacts generated by the reuse process. The motivation behind this is that the syntactical constructs of the specification languages are generally not sufficient to trace the reuse process. Such traces are important for documentation purposes, for maintenance, for execution replay and for software evolution.

Requirements engineering is concerned with the identification of high-level goals to be achieved by the system envisioned, the refinement of such goals, the operationalization of goals into services and constraints, and the assignment of responsibilities for the resulting requirements to agents such as humans, devices and programs. Goal refinement and operationalization is a complex process which is not well supported by current requirements engineering technology. Ideally some form of formal support should be provided, but formal methods are difficult and costly to apply at this stage.This paper presents an approach to goal refinement and operationalization which is aimed at providing constructive formal support while hiding the underlying mathematics. The principle is to reuse generic refinement patterns from a library structured according to strengthening/weakening relationships among patterns. The patterns are once for all proved correct and complete. They can be used for guiding the refinement process or for pointing out missing elements in a refinement. The cost inherent to the use of a formal method is thus reduced significantly. Tactics are proposed to the requirements engineer for grounding pattern selection on semantic criteria.The approach is discussed in the context of the multi-paradigm language used in the KAOS method; this language has an external semantic net layer for capturing goals, constraints, agents, objects and actions together with their links, and an inner formal assertion layer that includes a real-time temporal logic for the specification of goals and constraints. Some frequent refinement patterns are high-lighted and illustrated through a variety of examples.The general principle is somewhat similar in spirit to the increasingly popular idea of design patterns, although it is grounded on a formal framework here.

Recently a number of requirements engineering languages and methods have flourished that not only address 'what' questions but also 'why', 'who' and 'when' questions. The objective of the paper is twofold: to assess the strengths and weaknesses of one of these methodologies on a nontrivial benchmark; and to illustrate and discuss a number of challenging issues that need to be addressed for such methodologies to become effective in supporting real, complex requirements engineering tasks. The problem considered here is that of a distributed meeting scheduler system; the methodology considered is the KAOS goal directed language and method. The issues raised from this case study include goal identification, the "deidelization" of unachievable goals, the handling of interfering goals, the impact of early formal reasoning, the merits of early reuse of abstract descriptions and categories, requirements traceability and the need to link requirements to retractable assumptions, and the potential benefits of hybrid acquisition strategies.