Revisiting Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering with a Regulation View

Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) is considered to be one of the main achievements that the Requirements Engineering field has produced since its inception. Several GORE methods were designed in the last twenty years in both research and industry. In analyzing individual and organizational behavior, goals appear as a natural element. There are other organizational models that may better explain human behavior, albeit at the expense of more complex models. We present one such alternative model that explains individual and organizational survival through continuous regulation. We give our point of view of the changes needed in GORE methods in order to support this alternative view through the use of maintenance goals and beliefs. We illustrate our discussion with the real example of a family practitioner association that needed a new information system

Extending Business Process Models with Appreciation

We use homeostasis, the maintenance of steady states in an organism, to explain some of the decisions made by participants in a business process. We use Vickers’ Appreciative System to model the homeostatic states with Harel’s statecharts. We take the example of a doctoral student recruitment process formally defined between a faculty member, a graduate student candidate and a doctoral school. We analyze some gaps in the process caused by a misfit between norms of the process participants. We present a rationale for the anticipation and resolution of these misfits. We extend the traditional operational model with an appreciative model. This model represents the appreciative systems of process participants. Understanding these appreciative systems is necessary to make explicit the misfit between the model and the observed reality. The operational model represents the “technical” perspective on the business process, the one that can be automated. The appreciative model represents the “social” perspective, the one that explains the participants’ behavior as a result of their individual and collective norms. By combining these two perspectives, we can appreciate the richness of the development of socio-technical systems