Towards an Integrated Meta-Model for Requirements Engineering

Traditional, plan-driven, requirements engineering identifies separate phases in the process with well-documented outputs associated with of each of them. The plan-driven system development is suitable for predictable projects where all properties of the end system are known or requested from the start. In many situations, however, the properties of the final system cannot be determined on beforehand requiring thus a basic part of the system to be built fast, and further enable it to evolve. For this reason, it has become more common in recent years to adopt agile development methods, which foster interactive working with customers, in short iterations, and with frequent system changes and releases. Because the plan-driven and agile approaches substantially differ in their main concepts and working steps related to requirements engineering, and the fact that larger projects often blend them, we have identified a need for establishing relationships between them through an integrated meta-model. The final artifact contains the elements of both agile and plan-driven requirements engineering, supporting thus their separate, or hybrid use, which we have illustrated and thereby discussed and concluded this research-in-progress study