An Agile Technique for Agent Based Goal Refinement to Elicit Soft Goals in Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering

Goal oriented requirements engineering methods have gained significance because they define the requirements in terms of goals which are well understood by the stakeholders. Although the goals are extracted from the stakeholders having good domain knowledge, but extracting these goals is a challenging task in the goal oriented methods, especially the soft goals about which even the stakeholders have very little knowledge. To extract the soft goals, the high level goals are decomposed and a guiding model for goal refinement involving active participation of stakeholders, is essential. We propose a methodology driven approach involving maximum participation of stakeholders for eliciting the soft goals, where the soft goals are elicited by the stakeholders from the high-level goals through the process of Goal Refinement, involving Agents. The elicited goals are compiled through a software program called Activity Card Compiler. The methodology is used for Soft Goal Elicitation for the development of an Web Based News Application. We present an analysis of our results.