Camille Salinesi

Modeling Goals and Reasoning with Them

The concept of goal has been used in many domains such as management sciences and strategic planning, artificial intelligence and human computer interaction. Recently, goal-driven approaches have been developed and tried out to support requirements engineering activities such as requirements elicitation, specification, validation, modification, structuring and negotiation. This chapter first review various research efforts undertaken in this line of research and presents the state-of-the-art in using goals to engineer requirements. It then presents a particular goal model, the goal/strategy map, and shows that maps can help with facing the challenge of new emerging multi-purposes systems, i.e. systems imposing variability in requirements elaboration and customization in the requirements engineering process.

Supporting Requirements Elicitation through Goal/Scenario Coupling

Goals have long been recognized to be an essential component involved in the Requirements Engineering (RE) process. They have proved to be an effective way to support a number of requirements engineering activities such as requirements elicitation, systematic exploration of design choices, checking requirements completeness, ensuring requirements pre-traceability and helping in the detection of threats, conflicts, obstacles and their resolution. The leading role played by goals in the RE process led to a whole stream of research on goal modeling, goal specification/formulation and goal-based reasoning for the multiple aforementioned purposes. On the other hand, there is evidence that dealing with goal is not an easy task and presents a number of difficulties in practice. To overcome these difficulties, many authors suggest combining goals and scenarios. The reason is that they complement each other: there is a mutual mitigation of difficulties encountered with one by using the other. The paper reviews various research efforts undertaken in this line of research. It uses LEcritoire, an approach that guides the requirements elicitation and specification process through interleaved goal modelling and scenario authoring to illustrate the combined use of goals and scenarios to reason about requirements for the system To-Be.

On the Ontological Expressiveness of the High-Level Constraint Language for Product Line Specification

The High-Level Constraint Language (HLCL) consolidates the constraints scattered in several product line notations in an abstract and technologically independent language. Previous research has demonstrated that HLCL is suitable to represent most product line constraints from a practical point of view. However, the question about to what extent the HLCL is able to represent product line variability is still open. In this study, we refer to the ontological expressiveness theory to answer this question and to evaluate how well HLCL can represent the state of affairs for which it is proposed. Therefore, this evaluation considers HLCL’s ontological expressiveness regarding its completeness and clarity. Our results show that (1) HLCL closely represents the concepts in the ontological framework. However, some variability concepts should be integrated for obtaining a 100% level of completeness. (2) HLCL’s high level of abstraction impacts its clarity. The discussion of the research presented in this paper opens the perspectives to build a constraint-based language for product line engineering.