Goal-Oriented Requirements Enginering: A Roundtrip from Research to Practice

The software industry is more than ever facing the challenge of delivering WYGIWYW software (What You Get Is What You Want). A well-structured document specifying adequate, complete, consistent, precise, and measurable requirements is a critical prerequisite for such software. Goals have been recognized to be among the driving forces for requirements elicitation, elaboration, organization, analysis, negotiation, documentation, and evolution. Growing experience with goal-oriented requirements engineering suggests synergistic links between research in this area and good practice. We discuss one journey along this road from influencing ideas and research results to tool developments to good practice in industrial projects. On the way, we discuss some lessons learnt, obstacles to technonogy transfer, and challenges for better requirements engineering research and practice.