From object orientation to goal orientation: A paradigm shift for requirements engineering

Requirements engineering (RE) is concerned with the elicitation of the objectives to be achieved by the system envisioned, the operationalization of such objectives into specifications of services and constraints, the assignment of responsibilities for the resulting requirements to agents such as humans, devices and software, and the evolution of such requirements over time and across system families. Getting high-quality requirements is difficult and critical. Recent surveys have confirmed the growing recognition of RE as an area of primary concern in software engineering research and practice. The paper reviews the important limitations of OO modeling and formal specification technology when applied to this early phase of the software lifecycle. It argues that goals are an essential abstraction for eliciting, elaborating, modeling, specifying, analyzing, verifying, negotiating and documenting robust and conflict-free requirements. A safety injection system for a nuclear power plant is used as a running example to illustrate the key role of goals while engineering requirements for high assurance systems.