Analysing the strategic alignment of software requirements primarily provides
assurance to stakeholders that the software-to-be will add value to the
organisation. Additionally, such analysis can improve a requirement by
disambiguating its purpose and value, thereby supporting validation and
value-oriented decisions in requirements engineering processes, such as
prioritisation, release planning, and trade-off analysis. We review current
approaches that could enable such an analysis. We focus on Goal Oriented
Requirements Engineering methodologies, since goal graphs are well suited for
relating software goals to business goals. However, we argue that unless the
extent of goal-goal contribution is quantified with verifiable metrics, goal
graphs are not sufficient for demonstrating the strategic alignment of software
requirements. Since the concept of goal contribution is predictive, what
results is a forecast of the benefits of implementing software requirements.
Thus, we explore how the description of the contribution relationship can be
enriched with concepts such as uncertainty and confidence, non-linear
causation, and utility. We introduce the approach using an example software
project from Rolls-Royce.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1211.625
