Fitting information systems to business needs is considered equally important by both, the Requirements Engineering and MIS communities. Even though alignment/fit clearly appears as desirable, a number of issues still remain unsolved. This paper gives to fitness a central position and introduces the notion of a fitness relationship and its measurement. It highlights two sets of issues, one involved in understanding this relationship and the second in engineering it. It also points out broad directions and trends in resolving these issues.

Despite its growing acceptance, Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) remains a computing mechanism to speed up the design of software applications by assembling ready-made software services. We argue that it is difficult for business people to fully benefit of SOC if it remains at the software level. The paper proposes a move toward a description of services in business terms, i.e., intentions and strategies to achieve them and to organize their publication, search, and composition on the basis of these descriptions. In this way, it leverages SOC to an intentional level, ISOC. We present ISM, the model to describe intentional services, and populate the service registry with their descriptions. We highlight its intention-driven perspective for service description, retrieval, and composition. Thereafter, we propose a methodology to determine intentional services that meet business goals and to publish them in the registry. Finally, the paper introduces a set of transformations to bridge the gap from the intentional level to the implementation one.

International audience

The MAP model was introduced in information system engineering in order to model processes on a flexible way. The intentional level of this model helps an engineer to execute a process with a strong relationship to the situation of the project at hand. In the literature, attempts for having a practical use of maps are not numerous. Our aim is to enhance the guidance mechanisms of the process execution by reusing graph algorithms. After clarifying the existing relationship between graphs and maps, we improve the MAP model by adding qualitative criteria. We then offer a way to express maps with graphs and propose to use Graph theory algorithms to offer an automatic guidance of the map. We illustrate our proposal by an example and discuss its limitations.

Constraint Programming (CP), and in particular boolean CP, has been used so far to support analysis of variability models such as Feature Oriented Domain Analysis (FODA) and like. This paper goes a step further by using constraint programming to specify the Product Line (PL). The vision of variability and variation points completely disappear, and the focus is completely on constraints. Of course, the constraints can originate from various PL models, which can still be used to guide product analysis. However, owing to the unique constraint program, the analysis of the different viewpoints represented by each of these models is achieved in an integrated way.

Product line models (PLM) are important artifacts in product line engineering. Due to their size and complexity, it is difficult to detect defects in PLMs. The challenge is however important: any error in a PLM will inevitably impact configuration, generating issues such as incorrect product models, inconsistent architectures, poor reuse, difficulty to customize products, etc. Surveys on feature-based PLM verification approaches show that there are many verification criteria, that these criteria are defined in different ways, and that different ways of working are proposed to look for defect. The goal of this paper is to systematize PLM verification. Based on our literature review, we propose a list of 23 verification criteria that we think cover those available in the literature.

Method Engineering has emerged in response to the need to adapt methods to better fit the needs of the development task at hand. It aims at providing techniques for retrieving reusable method components, adapting and assembling these together to form the new method. The paper provides a survey of the main results obtained for the two issues of defining and assembling components. Given the amplitude of the results obtained, the paper concludes that the research community has reached considerable maturity. It argues thereafter that the full power of method components can be widely exploited by moving to the notion of method services and briefly outlines a possible approach towards MaaS, Method as a Service.

Method engineering has emerged in response to the need to adapt methods to better fit the needs of the development task at hand. Its aim is to provide techniques for retrieving reusable method components, adapting and assembling these together to form the new method. Based on a survey of these exiting techniques, the paper proposes first, a generic process model supporting their integration in terms of four possible strategies for action. This model is aimed at helping the method engineer either selecting one strategy or combining several ones that best fit the situation of the method engineering project at hand. Second, the paper presents one of the four method engineering strategies embedded in the generic model, namely the evolution-driven strategy and illustrates it with the experiment done by the authors on a large scale project.

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Over the last decade, a large number of Method Engineering (ME) approaches have been developed to adapt information system methods (ISM) to specific situations of projects at hand. However, ME has not been yet, widely spread in the professional world. Our belief is that limitations such as the lack of standards, the proposal of proprietary solutions and an excessive emphasis on engineering issues hamper the practical use of existing ME approaches. To overtake these limitations the position of this paper is to view a Method as a Service (MaaS) and to adapt the SOA architecture to make method and their components widely accessible on the Internet. The paper introduces the concept of MaaS and discusses the feasibility of its implementation using service-oriented technologies.

We argue that it is difficult for business people to fully benefit from the SOA if it remains at the software level. The paper proposes a move towards a description of services in business terms, i.e. goals and to organise their publication, search and composition on the basis of these descriptions. Thereafter, we propose a requirements engineering process to determine intentional services that meet business goals.

The connectivity generated by the Internet is opening opportunities of services composition. As a consequence, organizations are forming online alliances in order to deliver integrated value-added services. However, due to the lack of methodologies and tools, the development of such composite service across organizations is usually ad-hoc and poses problems especially in the identification, composition and orchestration issues. In this paper, we propose a goal driven approach to understand the needs of different organizations for a new added-value composite service and to model the cooperative process supporting this service provision in a declarative, goal driven manner. The goal model called Map, is then used for service elicitation, distribution and orchestration. The paper presents the approach and illustrates it with an e-government cooperative service.

Although procuring enterprise resource planning systems from commercial suppliers is becoming increasingly popular in our industry, fitting those systems to customer requirements remains problematic. The authors propose an approach for matching ERP system functionality to customer requirements. The assumption made is that the ERP system postulates a set of requirements that are worth eliciting from the ERP documentation as abstractions of the ERP system functionality. Then, the requirements engineering process is a process that matches the ERP set of requirements against organisational requirements. Those requirements that match, perhaps after adaptation, identify the ERP system features and their adaptations, that must be included in the ERP installation. To facilitate the matching process, the ERP requirements and the organisational requirements are both expressed using the same representation system, that of a map. The paper presents the map representation system and the matching process. The process is illustrated by considering the Treasury module of SAP and its installation in the financial management of a cultural exchanges unit.

This paper presents results from the first of two empirical studies which examine the effectiveness of guidelines for use case authoring. The ESPRIT 21.903 CREWS long-term research project has developed style and content guidelines for authoring use cases for requirements acquisition and validation. The effectiveness of these guidelines has been evaluated under different conditions. Results indicate that: the authoring guidelines improve the overall quality of the use case prose; the different guidelines work differently and with different levels of efficiency; and use cases are never entirely correctly written; thus, they can be systematically corrected. The paper details a qualitative and quantitative comparison between guided and non-guided use case authoring. It outlines lessons learned and implications for the CREWS software tools design.

In the context of requirements engineering (RE), both goal-driven and scenario-based approaches have proven useful for eliciting, justifying and validating system requirements. In order to overcome some of the deficiencies and limitations of these approaches when used in isolation, proposals have been made to couple goals and scenarios together. The CREWS'-L'Ecritoire approach advocates bi-directional coupling precisely to permit two way movement between goals and scenarios. We report an experiment using the CREWS-L'Ecritoire approach on a large scale business reengineering project conducted for an electricity supply and distribution company. We focused on a set of issues we found important and of a significance beyond the limits of our brief. We considered three kinds of issue as found in goal-driven approaches, in scenario-based approaches, and those specific to goal-scenario coupling. We devote particular attention to the latter and assess the extent to which the goal-scenario coupling helps to resolve the first two.

Even though goal modeling is an effective approach to requirements engineering, it is known to present a number of difficulties in practice. The paper discusses these difficulties and proposes to couple goal modeling and scenario authoring to overcome them. Whereas existing techniques use scenarios to concretize goals, we use them to discover goals. Our proposal is to define enactable rules which form the basis of a software environment called L'Ecritoire to guide the requirements elicitation process through interleaved goal modeling and scenario authoring. The focus of the paper is on the discovery of goals from scenarios. The discovery process is centered around the notion of a requirement chunk (RC) which is a pair. The paper presents the notion of RC, the rules to support the discovery of RCs and illustrates the application of the approach within L'Ecritoire using the ATM example. It also evaluates the potential practical benefits expected from the use of the approach.

The new emerging field of the method engineering discipline acknowledges the need for a rapid construction of methods. We propose an approach aiming to fulfil this objective. The approach is based on the assumption that there exists generic method construction knowledge which can be formalised into method construction patterns for further reuse. Under our approach, the construction of a method consists of applying the generic method construction patterns to its product model in order to generate the process model. The paper proposes a set of patterns to cover the various aspects of system engineering, details and exemplifies some of them, and finally validates the patterns against existing methods.

Despite a constant improvement in automation in CASE environments, the level of guidance provided to developers is still low, especially in the early phases of information systems engineering. We argue in this paper that a more effective guidance to requirements engineers can be based on a process meta-model which allows us to deal with a large variety of situations in a flexible, decision-oriented manner and supports different levels of granularity in decision making. The paper presents the process guidance meta-model and shows how it can guide the requirements engineer punctuality-to take the right decision in the adequate situation-as well as globally, to control the decision flow.>

NATURE is a collaborative basic research project on theories underlying requirements engineering funded by the ESPRIT III program of the European communities. Its goals are to develop a theory of knowledge representation that embraces subject, usage and development worlds surrounding the system, including expressive freedoms; a theory of domain engineering that facilitates the identification, acquisition and formalization of domain knowledge as well as similarity-based matching and classifying of software engineering knowledge; and a process engineering theory that promotes context and decision-based control of the development process. These theories are integrated and evaluated in a prototype environment constructed around an extended version of the conceptual modeling language Telos.>

Designers of office information systems, which share various features with information systems and software development, need to carefully consider special issues such as document and communication flows, user roles, user interfaces, and available technology. The ESPRIT Project, Automatic TOols for Designing Office Information Systems (TODOS), proposes an integrated environment for office design with tools for requirements collection and analysis, conceptual design, rapid prototyping, and architecture selection. Conceptual design is a central phase of office system design: It provides correct and complete functional requirements from which the office prototype will be developed and the final architecture chosen. C-TODOS, the conceptual design support tool developed within TODOS, is presented in this paper. The purpose of C-TODOS is to give the designer tools for supporting conceptual modeling activities with the goal of obtaining correct, consistent, and good quality office-functional specifications. This paper presents C-TODOS within the TODOS development environment and describes the basic features of the tool: the TODOS Conceptual Model, the Specification Database, and the Modeling, Query and Consistency Checking Modules. The use of C-TODOS, through illustration of the development of a test case, and possible future research are discussed.

We are concerned by data processing in both centralized and distributed environments. We claim that it is profitable and efficient to make the same effort to the design of the transactions system as we made to the design of the data system. To define such a system, we present in this paper two levels of transactions modeling. We discuss the impact of the proposed modeling upon concurrency and parallelism management.