Supporting Requirements Analysis in Tropos: A Planning-Based Approach

Abstract

Abstract. Software systems are becoming more and more part of human life influencing organizational and social activities. This introduces the need of considering the design of a software system as an integral part of the organizational and social structure development. Alternative requirements and design models have to be evaluated and selected from a social perspective finding a right trade-off between the technical and social dimension. In this paper, we present a Tropos-based approach for requirements analysis, which adopts planning techniques for exploring the space of requirements alternatives and a number of social criteria for their evaluation. We describe the tool-supported analysis process with the help of a case study (the e-voting system), which is a part of a project funded by the Autonomous Province of Trento.

Designing socio-technical systems: from stakeholder goals to social networks

“…To analyze actor interdependencies means to check whether a goal can be delegated from an actor who wants to achieve it to an actor who is capable of achieving it, namely, whether there exists a path between two actors. In [11], we give details on analyzing and dealing with missing capabilities, which is based on label propagation algorithm similar to the one presented in [29]. After a missing capability is detected, there are two ways to deal with it:…”

“…The approach is evaluated on the basis of Air Traffic Management case study which comes from SERENITY Project [45]. The illustrative examples used in [11] are taken from the e-voting case study related to the project funded by the Autonomous Province of Trento, which has the goal of providing a smooth transition from the paper-based voting system to new technologies.…”

“…The general schema of the process, which we have already presented in [11], is presented in Figure 3. The description of an initial organizational setting is provided by a designer, and includes actors, their goals and capabilities, dependencies among actors, possible ways of goal refinements (decompositions of a goal into AND/OR-subgoals), and other goal and actor properties (see Section 3.1 for details).…”

“…In addition, in [10] we have discussed a preliminary approach to the evaluation of alternative system configurations. In [11], we place an emphasis on the systematic process of requirements analysis to support the design of socio-technical systems. In this paper, we integrate and extend earlier published work, and present a complete tool-supported process.…”

Analyzing goal models

“…However, many different analysis techniques for goal models have been introduced, taking a variety of approaches. Some techniques propagate satisfaction values through links to and from goals in the model [1][9] [26], others apply metrics over the structure of the model [1] [11], apply planning techniques using tasks and goals in the model [7] [4], run simulations over model tasks [16] [34], and yet others perform checks over model contents [14] [19].…”