Tropos: A Framework for Requirements-Driven Software Development

TLDR

Software development has traditionally been driven by the prevailing programming paradigm, with structured programming spawning structured analysis and design, and object‑oriented programming giving rise to object‑oriented analysis and design. This chapter investigates a requirements‑driven methodology that reuses the same concepts for defining requirements, design, and implementation. The approach adopts Eric Yu’s i* framework, leveraging its actor and goal concepts to model early and late requirements as well as architectural and detailed design. The resulting Tropos framework complements existing agent‑oriented programming platforms.

Abstract

Traditionally, software development techniques have been implementation-driven in the sense that the programming paradigm of the day dictated the design and requirements analysis techniques used. For example, structured programming led to structured analysis and design techniques in the ‘70s. More recently, object-oriented programming gave rise to object-oriented analysis and design. In this chapter we explore a software development methodology which is requirements-driven in the sense that the concepts used to define requirements for a software system are also used later on during design and implementation. Our proposal adopts Eric Yu's i* framework [1], a modeling framework for early requirements, based on the notions of actor and goal. We use these notions as a foundation to model late requirements, as well as architectural and detailed design. The proposed framework, named Tropos, seems to complement nicely current proposals for agent-oriented programming platforms.