Requirements engineering with viewpoints

TLDR

The requirements engineering process requires a clear understanding of the intended system’s services, users, environment, and constraints, and involves capturing, analyzing, and resolving many ideas, perspectives, and relationships at varying levels of detail, yet global reasoning methods lack an expressive framework to adequately articulate this distributed requirements knowledge structure. The paper addresses difficulties in establishing stable requirements and proposes a viewpoint‑oriented requirements definition (VORD) method to mitigate these issues. VORD structures the requirements engineering process using viewpoints linked to sources of requirements, is positioned relative to existing viewpoint‑oriented approaches, and demonstrates its advantages through a simple bank auto‑teller example.

Abstract

The requirements engineering process involves a clear understanding of the requirements of the intended system. This includes the services required of the system, the system users, its environment and associated constraints. This process involves the capture, analysis and resolution of many ideas, perspectives and relationships at varying levels of detail. Requirements methods based on global reasoning appear to lack the expressive framework to adequately articulate this distributed requirementsknowledge structure. The paper describes the problems in trying to establish an adequate and stable set of requirements and proposes a viewpoint-oriented requirements definition (VORD) method as a means of tackling some of these problems. This method structures the requirements engineering process using viewpoints associated with sources of requirements. The paper describes VORD in the light of current viewpoint-oriented requirements approaches and shows how it improves on them. A simple example of a bank auto-teller system is used to demonstrate the method.