Continuous Requirements Engineering Using Model Federation

Researchers in software engineering have been striving to produce new methods to improve the quality of development methodologies to consequently produce quality products. Proposition of iterative and evolutionary approaches was triggered by the realization that requirements engineering is not confined to the initial phases of software development only. With this shift of perspective, requirements engineering has become more or less a continuous process in software development lifecycles. We believe that existing requirements engineering approaches and associated tooling leave a room for improvement in putting 'continuity' into practice. A continuous requirements engineering methodology needs to take into account different concerns of all the stakeholders involved in the process. Approaches like KAOS bring the multi-view nature of requirements modeling in focus by using different views for goal, responsibility, object and operation modeling. We argue that a multi-view approach, maintaining a dynamic link between the requirement models and multiple sources of requirements, can offer a better support for continuous requirements engineering methodology. In this paper, we expand on this argument and present the early findings with the associated in progress tooling support.