GOAL, SOFT-GOAL AND QUALITY REQUIREMENT

Thi-Thuy-Hang Hoang, Manuel Kolp

2010

Abstract

Requirements are input for the process of building software. Depending on the development methodology, they are usually classified into several subclasses of requirements. Traditional approaches distinguish between functional and non-functional requirements and the modern goal-based approaches use hard-goals and soft-goals to describe requirements. While non-functional requirements are known also as quality requirements, neither hard-goals nor soft-goals are equivalent to quality requirements. Due to the abstractness of quality requirements, they are usually described as soft-goals but soft-goals are not necessarily quality requirements. In this paper, we propose a way to clear the problematic ambiguity between soft-goals and quality requirements in goal-based context. We try to reposition the notion of quality requirement in the relations to hard-goals and soft-goals. This allows us to decompose a soft-goal into a set of hard-goals (required functions) and quality requirements (required qualities of function). The immediate applications of this analysis are quality-aware development methodologies for multi-agent systems among which QTropos is an example.

References

  1. Castro, J, Kolp, M & Mylopoulos, J 2002, 'Towards requirements-driven information system engineering: the Tropos project', Information System Journal, no. 27, pp. 365-389.
  2. Chung, L, Nixon, BA, Yu, E & Mylopoulos, J 2000, Nonfunctional Requirements in Software Engineering, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
  3. Hoang, TTH 2008, 'Quality-aware agent-oriented software development', Iinternal Report, Louvain School of Management, Université catholique de Louvain.
  4. Hoang, TTH & Kolp, M 2009, 'Social patterns for quality control in agent-oriented systems', ICSOFT.
  5. Jack, AOSPL 2002, 'JACK intelligent agents - User guide'.
  6. Jureta, I, Mylopoulos, J & Faulkner, S 2008, 'Revisiting the core ontology and problem in requirements engineering', Proceedings of the 2008 16th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference.
  7. Letier, E 2001, 'Reasoning about Agents in Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering', PhD thesis, Université catholique de Louvain, Belgium.
  8. Mylopoulos, J, Chung, L, Liao, S, Wang, H & Yu, E 2001, 'Exploring alternatives during requirements analysis', IEEE Software, vol 18, pp. 92-96.
  9. Sommerville, I 2007, Software engineering, 8th edn, Addison-Wesley.
  10. Van Lamsweerde, A 2001, 'Goal-oriented requirements engineering: A guided tour', Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Symposium on Requirements, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA.
  11. Yu, E 1995, 'Modeling strategic relationships for process reengineering', PhD Thesis, University of Toronto.
  12. Zave, P & Jackson, M 1997, 'Four dark corners of requirements engineering', ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), vol 6, no. 1, pp. 1-30.
Download


Paper Citation


in Harvard Style

Hoang T. and Kolp M. (2010). GOAL, SOFT-GOAL AND QUALITY REQUIREMENT . In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS, ISBN 978-989-8425-06-5, pages 13-22. DOI: 10.5220/0002872100130022


in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis10,
author={Thi-Thuy-Hang Hoang and Manuel Kolp},
title={GOAL, SOFT-GOAL AND QUALITY REQUIREMENT},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS,},
year={2010},
pages={13-22},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002872100130022},
isbn={978-989-8425-06-5},
}


in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 3: ICEIS,
TI - GOAL, SOFT-GOAL AND QUALITY REQUIREMENT
SN - 978-989-8425-06-5
AU - Hoang T.
AU - Kolp M.
PY - 2010
SP - 13
EP - 22
DO - 10.5220/0002872100130022