A goal-oriented requirements modelling language for enterprise architecture

Methods for enterprise architecture, such as TOGAF, acknowledge the importance of requirements engineering in the development of enterprise architectures. Modelling support is needed to specify, document, communicate and reason about goals and requirements. Current modelling techniques for enterprise architecture focus on the products, services, processes and applications of an enterprise. In addition, techniques may be provided to describe structured requirements lists and use cases. Little support is available however for modelling the underlying motivation of enterprise architectures in terms of stakeholder concerns and the high-level goals that address these concerns. This paper describes a language that supports the modelling of this motivation. The definition of the language is based on existing work on high-level goal and requirements modelling and is aligned with an existing standard for enterprise modelling: the ArchiMate language. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how enterprise architecture can benefit from analysis techniques in the requirements domain

Goal-oriented requirements modeling as a means to address stakeholder-related issues in EA

In this paper we explore goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE) as a means to address stakeholder-related issues in the enterprise architecting process. We elaborate on a recent literature analysis on enterprise architecting issues. We refine this literature analysis results by identifying problem areas that we consider solvable by increasing the focus on the stakeholders in EA. We develop a conceptual model, which we use to provide reasoning about means to foster stakeholder orientation and thereby to address stakeholder-related issues. We argue that a stronger focus on the stakeholders‟ benefits EA and that this increased stakeholder orientation can be reached by leveraging intentional modeling used in software engineering

A method for developing Reference Enterprise Architectures

Industrial change forces enterprises to constantly adjust their organizational structures in order to stay competitive. In this regard, research acknowledges the potential of Reference Enterprise Architectures (REA). This thesis proposes REAM - a method for developing REAs. After contrasting organizations' needs with approaches available in the current knowledge base, this work identifies the absence of method support for REA development. Proposing REAM, the author aims to close this research gap and evaluates the method's utility by applying REAM in different naturalistic settings

A Pattern-Based Approach to Changing Software Requirements in Brown-Field Business Contexts

In organisations, competitive advantage is increasingly reliant on the alignment of sociotechnical systems with business processes. 'Socio-technical' refers to the complex systems of people, tasks and technology. Supporting this alignment is exacerbated by the speed of technological change and its relationship with organisation growth. This complexity is further aggravated in a number of ways. Organisations and/or parts of organisations are structured differently and have different approaches to change. These differences impact on their responsiveness to change, their use of technology, and its relationship to business processes. In requirements engineering, a lack of understanding of the organisational context in which change takes place has been a problem over the last decade. Eliciting requirements is complex, with requirements changing constantly. Delivered change is affected by further changing needs, as stakeholders identify new ways of using IT. Changing requirements can lead to mismatches between tasks, technology and people. Relations and their alignment can be compromised. We contribute to understanding this complex domain by presenting an approach which engages with stakeholders/users in the early stages of the requirements elicitation process. The two expressions of the approach are derived from the literature and 19 real-world studies. They are referred to as Conceptual Framework and Change Frame. Both support a problem-centred focus on context analysis when reasoning about changing technology in business processes. The framework provides structures, techniques, notation and terminology. These represent, describe, and analyse the context in which change takes place, in the present and over time. The Change Frame combines an extension of the framework with an organisation pattern. It facilitates representing, describing and analysing change, across the strategic/operation area of an organisation. A known pattern of solution is provided, for the recurring change problem of representing an organisation-wide change in different organisation locations. Chapter 4 shows the conceptual framework in the context of a real-world study, and chapter 6 uses a real-world use/case scenario to illustrate the change frame. Both chapters show support for understanding change, through client/customer and stakeholder/users reasoning about the implications of change

Review of Requirement Engineering Approaches for Software Product Lines

The Software Product Lines (SPL) paradigm is one of the most recent topics of interest for the software engineering community. On the one hand, the Software Product Lines is based on a reuse strategy with the aim to reduce the global time-to-market of the software product, to improve the software product quality, and to reduce the cost. On the other hand, traditional Requirement Engineering approaches could not be appropriated to deal with the new challenges that arises the SPL adoption. In the last years, several approaches have been proposed to cover this limitation. This technical report presents an analysis of specific approaches used in the development of SPL to provide solutions to model variability and to deal with the requirements engineering activities. The obtained results show that most of the research in this context is focused on the Domain Engineering, covering mainly the Feature Modeling and the Scenario Modeling. Among the studied approaches, only one of them supported the delta identification; this fact implies that new mechanisms to incorporate new deltas in the Domain specification are needed. Regarding the SPL adoption strategy, most of the approaches support a proactive strategy. However, this strategy is the most expensive and risk-prone. Finally, most of the approaches were based on modeling requirements with feature models giving less support to other important activities in the requirements engineering process such as elicitation, validation, or verification of requirements. The results of this study provide a wide view of the current state of research in requirements engineering for SPL and also highlight possible research gaps that may be of interest for researchers and practitioners.Blanes Domínguez, D.; Insfrán Pelozo, CE. (2011). Review of Requirement Engineering Approaches for Software Product Lines. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/1023