Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering, Part II

The last fifteen years have seen the rise of a new phase in software development which is concerned with the acquisition, modelling and analysis of stakeholder purposes ("goals") in order to derive functional and nonfunctional requirements. The history of ideas and research results for this new phase was reviewed in a RE'04 keynote presentation by Axel van Lamsweerde. We revisit the topic and sketch on-going research on a number of fronts. Specifically, we discuss an agent-oriented software development methodology -- called Tropos -- that is founded on the concepts of goal, actor as well as inter-actor dependencies. We also show how goal models that characterize a space of possible solutions for meeting stakeholder goals can be used as a basis for designing high variability software. In addition, we report on early work to extend database design techniques to support the generation of a database conceptual schema from stakeholder goals. The research reported is the result of collaborations with colleagues at the Universities of Toronto and Trento.