Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering

The rise of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems has been a major event in the software industry and it became a solution for most enterprises to manage their data and business processes. Successful ERP implementations can reduce costs by improving efficiency then lead to improved company performance and better competitive edge. Despite these benefits and the age of ERP existing for several decades still high percentage of implementation failures are documented. ERP is packaged software designed by following the best practice from the specific industry to support typical business processes in the entire industrial field, it was designed by ERP vendors and used by the organization which implement it. Since the designer and user are two independent entity misalignments between user's needs and the software design are often happen. The misalignment define new specific requirements must be embedded into selected ERP. Requirement engineering (RE) is a main part and initial activity of software engineering concern about defines stakeholder requirements, needs and desire. Requirements engineering is the basis for efficient software implementation and quality management. Tools and theories which support RE in general are numerous nowadays; however, the task of providing a tools and theories that specializes in Requirements engineering for Enterprise resource planning systems has been addressed rarely. For that; this paper discusses modelling and verification of ERP functional requirements based on colored Petri nets (CPN) after evaluation of different Business process modelling techniques by using analytical hierarchy process (AHP). CPN considered one of powerful business process modelling techniques and using it help in stakeholder involvement and appropriate organization's business process representation. The nature of colored Petri nets that help in verification of internal completeness and consistency of ERP functional requirements model.

Web engineering software development is facing continuous changes in technology implementation. This involves analysts, developers and designers to provide extra effort in the design and maintenance of Web applications in order to adapt them to changes in requirements and implementation technologies. In this paper, a systematic review is presented in order to obtain, in a formal way, the current state-of-the-art about approaches for modeling, analysis and specification of Web engineering requirements, supported with a formal and well defined strategy.

The advent of socio-technical, cyber-physical and artificial intelligence systems has broadened the scope of requirements engineering, which must now deal with new classes of requirements, concerning ethics, privacy and trust. This brings new challenges to Requirements Engineering, in particular regarding the understanding of the non-functional requirements behind these new types of systems. To address this issue, we propose the Ontology-based Requirements Engineering (ObRE) method, which aims to systematize the elicitation and analysis of requirements, by using an ontology to conceptually clarify the meaning of a class of requirements, such as privacy, ethicality and trustworthiness. We illustrate the working of ObRE by applying it to a real case study concerning trustworthiness requirements.

Lecture for an MBA Class describing the process for developing operational and technical requirements. Defines requirements, describes the differences between functional and non-functional requirements, pitfalls and common issues related to the process and provides an examples of operational and technical requirements.

ABSTRACT
Learning is a continuous, ongoing and a lifelong process. It is perhaps the fundamental process for survival and adaptation of human beings to both internal as well the external environment. Learning is most effective when geared to the physical and intellectual ability of the learner. Each learner has individual learning needs and it is important for the teachers/facilitators to know their learners well. The principles of pedagogy applicable to a child learner do not apply to adult learners. The adult learner cannot be treated as an oversized child learner. Hence the teachers/facilitators of adult learners prior to conceiving, designing or implementing learning programs have to first understand the characteristics of the adult learners.
Adult learner (mature student) is a term used to describe any person socially accepted as an adult who is involved in a systematic learning process, be it formal or non formal or informal. This process maybe self-mentored or corporate-sponsored; where learning may be undertaken as fulltime or a part time learner. Adult learners comprise of a diverse groups of people belonging to different genders, caste, class, religion, region, majority or minority groups, creed, race, ethnicity varying from each other in their needs, problems, requirements, attitudes and outlook towards life. Unlike a child learner the adult learner is autonomous and comes voluntarily to the learning situation. Since the adult learners are very clear about the results they anticipate from the learning process they may drop out of learning activities if their expectations aren’t met.
Adult learners have a vast wealth of knowledge acquired by controlling their environment and experiences of life. Their opinions, values and beliefs are their defining characteristics which they bring to the learning situations.  The teachers/facilitators in order not to hurt the self-image of adult learners have to treat them with utmost respect and equality. Any learning process construed for the adult learners has to be geared to meet the needs of the adult learners. The motivation to continue to learn for adults comes intrinsically unlike children and hence learning should be goal and relevancy-oriented, practical, using purposeful activities.
And not to forget that the adult learners usually carry a big bag of burden in form of commitments and responsibilities in their professional, personal, social life and the advancing age may add to their potential physical limitations. Hence the teachers /facilitators for learning to be successful have to be alert and sensitive to the needs and characteristics of their adult learners.

En este artículo presentamos la investigación y desarrollo en curso de la herramienta SBWmx-Tool, una aplicación Web
para el cálculo de los factores empleados en la construcción de estructuras marítimas (rompeolas, escolleras y espigones)
tales como el peso de los elementos de la estructura, coeficiente de transmisión del oleaje y el espesor de la coraza, entre
otros. SBWmx-Tool ha sido ideada para auxiliar al Ingeniero Civil (Construcción) en el diseño de estructuras marítimas a
través de la aplicación de distintas fórmulas, por ejemplo, la fórmula de Hudson, utilizada para la estabilidad de los
elementos de la estructura en condiciones normales y de tormenta. Durante la fase inicial del proceso de desarrollo, se
utilizó una aproximación orientada a objetivos para la especificación de requisitos así como el método para el desarrollo
de aplicaciones Web A-OOH (Adaptive Object-Oriented Hypertext). La aproximación utilizada como sustento teórico es
SBWmx (Submersible Breakwaters Approach), metodología empleada en el diseño y construcción de estructuras
marítimas, desarrollada en la Facultad de Ingeniería de la UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México).

We propose a modeling language for non-functional requirements (NFRs) that views NFRs as requirements over qual- ities, mapping a software-related domain to a quality space. The language is compositional in that it allows (recursively) complex NFRs to be constructed in several ways. Importantly, the lan- guage allows the definition of requirements about the quality of fulfillment of other requirements, thus capturing, among others, the essence of probabilistic and fuzzy goals as proposed in the literature. We also offer a methodology for systematically refining informal NFRs elicited from stakeholders, resulting in unambig- uous, de-idealized, and measurable requirements. The proposal is evaluated with a requirements dataset that includes 370 NFRs crossing 15 projects. The results suggest that our framework can adequately handle and clarify NFRs generated in practice.

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The term " Goal " is increasingly being used in Requirement Engineering. Goal-Oriented requirement engineering (GORE) provides an incremental approach for elicitation, analysis, elaboration & refinement, specification and modeling of requirements. Various Goal Oriented Requirement Engineering (GORE) methods exist for these requirement engineering processes like KAOS, GBRAM etc. GORE techniques are based on certain underlying concepts and principles. This paper presents and synthesizes the underlying concepts of GORE with respect to coverage of requirement engineering activities. The advantages of GORE claimed in the literature are presented. This paper evaluates GORE techniques on the basis of concepts, process and claimed advantages.

The requirements elicited from stakeholders suffer from various afflictions , including informality, vagueness, incompleteness, ambiguity, inconsistencies , and more. It is the task of the requirements engineering process to derive from these a formal specification that truly captures stakeholder needs. The Desiree requirements engineering framework supports a rich collection of refinement operators through which an engineer can iteratively transform stakeholder requirements into a specification. The framework includes an ontology, a formal representation for requirements, as well as a tool and a systematic process for conducting requirements engineering. This paper reports the results of a series of empirical studies intended to evaluate the effectiveness of Desiree. The studies consist of three controlled experiments, where students were invited to conduct requirements analysis using textbook techniques or our framework. The results of the experiments offer strong evidence that with sufficient training, our framework indeed helps users conduct more effective requirements analysis.

The domain of requirements engineering (RE) is intercepted by the interest of a wider community in the software industry. The role of RE is inevitable in the success and failure of software projects. RE is a multi-dimensional area and it is comprised of stakeholder analysis, requirements elicitation, and requirements prioritization mainly. In RE, the valuable requirements are explored from a critical set of stakeholders and these requirements are prioritized in order to design a system of high assurance. Several systematic literature reviews (SLR) are written related to RE domain which deliver a comprehensive knowledge in the domain of RE. Hence, currently no SLR exists that is able to provide an aggregate knowledge about RE intricacies. In this research, the different systematic reviews were investigated in order to aggregate the generated knowledge in different sub-domains of RE. This research highlights the objectives, sub-objectives of the existing SLRs and also presents information about RE issues in different perspectives. Initially, 214 studies were identified and only 39 studies were included in this SLR for research and analysis purposes.

Decision making in Software Engineering plays an important
role at different stages of Software development life cycle. In
this paper we consider the case study of selecting one among
the three Content Management Systems (CMS) for a
university website. We use our Goal-Oriented Requirements
Engineering (GORE) method to identify the soft goals which
play a vital role in deciding which CMS is chosen. Analytic
Hierarchy Process (AHP) is then used to prioritize the soft
goals. The output of AHP is used as input to Technique for
Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS)
which produces a metric which decides the best alternative
among the candidates.

While traditional approaches in business process modeling tend to focus on “how” the business processes are performed (adopting a behavioral description in which business processes are described in terms of procedural aspects), in goal-oriented business process modeling, the proposals strive to extend traditional business process methodologies by providing a dimension of intentionality to business processes. One of the key difficulties in enabling one to model goal- oriented processes concerns the identification or elicitation of goals. This paper reports on a case study conducted in a Brazilian hospital, in which we obtained several goal models represented in i*/Tropos, each of which corresponding to a business process also modeled in the scope of the study. We found NFR catalogues helpful in goal elicitation, uncovering goals that did not come up during previous interviews prior to these catalogues’ use.

Machine learning (ML), has become very popular, and it has gained much attention in academia and industry. Besides successful stories, industrial applications and research studies also report plenty of failures, unsatisfactory results, and a great many ML projects failing to meet unrealistic and feasible expectations. One of the important factors is the deficiency in requirements engineering (RE), specifically, regarding organizational contexts, and well-conducted Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) processes. However, the review of literature cannot provide sufficient work and present the required guidelines for GORE of ML applications. In this study, we adopt a GORE approach and extend it for the RE processes of ML applications. Goals can be expressed at different levels of abstraction and they are useful for elicitation, analyzing and identifying alternatives, and conflict resolutions related to RE. The GORE approach focuses on the strategic context of ML requirements and helps elaborate the requirements that support the organizational goals. Therefore, GORE’s main concerns are: how an ML application would achieve the organizational goals, how to operationalize these goals into services or products, and how to assign tasks and responsibilities. Goal-Oriented Requirement Language (GRL) is used for both modeling and reasoning. The contributions of this study are two-fold: (1st) drawing the practitioners’ and researchers’ attention to the problems of GORE for ML, (2nd) proposing an extended version of the GORE model. Consequently, this study can be viewed as an initial step towards the knowledge domain of RE for ML.

Keywords: Machine Learning, Requirements Engineering, Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering

Identification of performance requirements is important for successful development and deployment of the software product. The acceptance of the software product by the customer depends on the performance requirements which are incorporated in the software. For this, we need to identify all the performance requirements required by all stakeholders. In the literature not many approaches are available for this purpose. Hence, we have proposed a five layered model for identification of performance requirements. The proposed layered model has many advantages over non-layered approaches. As part of this model some rules are also proposed to be used in performance requirements identification process. The layered model is applied successfully on two case studies. The identified performance requirements are validated using a check list and in addition the completeness of the identified performance requirements is computed using a metric.

The Autonomy Levels for Unmanned Systems (ALFUS) framework is generic and applicable to multiple unmanned system (UMS) domains. The key component of the Framework is metrics along the three established axes or aspects. This paper attempts to examine how the metrics might be applied to selected domains that include homeland security, manufacturing, and defense. In particular, the paper attempts to lay out how the critical UMS concerns, including requirements specification, performance measures, safety, and risks might be established from the Framework.

Abstract: The requirement to living  and  hence evolving system to sustain homeostasis imposes on the evolving system the demand for its ability to sustain  adaptive engineering dynamics in response to the changes in its environment. Physics based mechanism of  these changes’ assessment is offered. Therefore the  neurophysiology-grounded mechanism of adaptive behavior of the actor  on the ground of  adaptive stress-release difference-making reaction may be worked out on that basis.  Via probabilistic results of difference-making neurophysiological activity of the structurally evolving actors the information on their structure gets fixed into materialistic changes in their environment. These changes are facilitating simultaneously  both the increase of engineering efficiency of energy-conversion via social activity,  and  optimization of the social energy-conversion  structures in order to decrease the waste energy loss  24-1-20

Optimizing Warfighter Performance through the Development of HSI Metrics, Requirements, and Collaboration

Optimizing performance to enhance decision-making and information processing while decreasing the cognitive and physical load placed on warfighters is one of the basic tenets driving the Army’s Human System Integration (HSI) Program (formerly known as Manpower and Personnel Integration or MANPRINT).  Our HSI Program focuses on seven main focus areas that have been found to influence effective use of new technology including manpower, personnel, training, human factors engineering, health hazards, system safety, and soldier survivability.  New technological capabilities are procured with the intent to increase the ability of our warfighters to conduct basic soldier skills – move, shoot, and communicate – as well as provide casualty care and facilitate the decision-making that accompanies their use to the lowest-levels in the Army.  In order to ensure that our warfighters have the requisite knowledge, skills, abilities, and training for effective use of new technologies and that these new technologies meet mission requirements, all those involved in research and development (R&D) and the acquisition process must understand the context in which warfighters work. 

Understanding this context has proven challenging.  Common justifications for not including warfighters in R&D and the acquisition process include: 
• Designing usable systems is just common sense.
• Design guidelines and checklists are sufficient to guide design.
• A consistent user interface design will ensure a safe, usable design.
• Warfighter-centered design activities will slow down the design process and are increase cost.
• The “usability people” can make the system user-friendly after development is done.
• Former warfighters who are subject matter experts can provide the same level of design knowledge and context.
• It is too difficult to locate warfighters to participate in warfighter-design activities.
• Warfighters do not really know what they need.
• Usability testing might uncover a showstopper and kill a program.
• It is too early in the process – not everything has been thought out.

Any one of these justifications has the potential to thwart the participation of human factors engineers and HSI practitioners in the design process.  Without an understanding of a system’s role in the mission and the constraints in which it will be used, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will meet users’ needs.  It is only through active duty warfighter participation in R&D and acquisition that we will understand context of use and be able to use this information as the fundamental basis for making design trade-offs and decisions.  In general, military software systems are plagued by cumbersome data entry procedures, meaningless error messages, cryptic abbreviations, and confusing navigation steps among a multitude of cluttered, inconsistent screens that do not follow conventions that people have grown accustomed to using.  Military hardware suffers a similar fate with designs that fail to accommodate the 5th to 95th percentile warfighter.  Design deficiencies become increasingly critical as female warfighters, who were not previously considered during the design of some military occupational specialty specific equipment, are becoming poised to become target end-users as the military expands the role of women in combat.  Complex, unaccommodating designs become even more problematic as warfighters seek to maximize mission efficiency at the lowest level with the expectation that “Every person (in) a section should be able to operate every piece of equipment” (Behringer, 2014).

What can be done to reverse this trend and develop seamless human-machine interfaces and to develop these interfaces so they learn and maintain rich models of users over the course of numerous interactions?  First, warfighters must be included in the process.  Their needs must be understood.  User-centric design processes and activities must be used.  Human performance and human-system interaction requirements and HSI metrics must be developed and included in acquisition documents.  These notions are not novel.  However, they have not been institutionalized in the military acquisition process.  As a community, we must present a united front and work together to demonstrate the value and impact that we in concert with our users can have on the design of useful, usable system design when HSI metrics and user-centered design processes are implemented.           

This presentation will provide recommendations for a path forward based on lessons learned during theater deployment and the implementation of user-centered design practices and HSI design metrics during recent acquisition programs that ultimately influenced system features, functionality and design at the user interface.

References

Behringer, P. (2 Sep 2014). Maximizing mission efficiency at the lowest level.  Retrieved November 13, 2014 from http://www.army.mil/article/133407/Maximizing_mission_efficiency_at_the_lowest_level/.

Nowadays, there are more and more software systems operating in highly open, dynamic and unpredictable environments. Moreover, as technology advances, requirements for these systems become ever more ambitious. We have reached a point where system complexity and environmental uncertainty are major challenges for the Information Technology industry. A solution proposed to deal with this challenge is to make systems (self-)adaptive, meaning they would evaluate their own behavior and performance, in order to re-plan and reconfigure their operations when needed. In order to develop an adaptive system, one needs to account for some kind of feedback loop. A feedback loop constitutes an architectural prosthetic to a system proper, introducing monitoring and adaptation functionalities to the overall system. Even if implicit or hidden in the system's architecture, adaptive systems must have a feedback loop among their components in order to evaluate their behavior and act accordingly. In this thesis, we take a Requirements Engineering perspective to the design of adaptive software systems and, given that feedback loops constitute an (architectural) solution for adaptation, we ask the question: what is the requirements problem this solution is intended to solve? To answer this question, we define two new classes of requirements: Awareness Requirements prescribe the indicators of requirements convergence that the system must strive to achieve, whereas Evolution Requirements represent adaptation strategies in terms of changes in the requirements models themselves. Moreover, we propose that System Identification be conducted to elicit parameters and analyze how changes in these parameters affect the monitored indicators, representing such effect using differential relations. These new elements represent the requirements for adaptation, making feedback loops a first-class citizen in the requirements specification. Not only they assist requirements engineers in the task of elicitation and communication of adaptation requirements, but with the proper machine-readable representations, they can serve as input to a framework that implements the generic functionalities of a feedback loop, reasoning about requirements at runtime. We have developed one such framework, called Zanshin, and validated our proposals through experiments based on a well-known case study adopted from the literature.

The Zanshin framework adopts a Requirements Engineering perspective to the design of adaptive systems and is centered around the idea of feedback loops. Evaluation experiments conducted so far have used simulations, limiting the strength of our conclusions on the viability of our proposal. In this paper, we report on the experience of applying Zanshin to an existing base system, a software that simulates an Automated Teller Machine (ATM), available online, drawing conclusions on the applicability of the framework’s potential in real-life situations.

The “goal domain” addresses objectives in a broad scope ranging from high-level statements expressing the vision and mission of an organization (or community) to declarations of the results that must be achieved by business process execution. This paper reviews the support for the goal domain in ISO RM-ODP. We analyze the conceptualization for goals (objectives) in the reference model’s Enterprise Viewpoint using a fragment of the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) that deals with some aspects of social reality and intentionality. The interpretation of the RM-ODP concepts in terms of this foundation may help to provide a sound underpinning for these concepts and support the identification of possible extensions of the reference model.

The software agent paradigm has received considerable at- tention recently, both in research and industrial practice. However, adop- tion of this software paradigm remains elusive in software engineering practice. We claim that part of the adoption problem lies with the fact that mentalistic and social concepts underlying agents are subjective and complex for the average practitioner. Specifically, although there are many efforts related to the topic coming from philosophy, cogni- tive sciences and computer science, a uniform and well-founded semantic view on these concepts is currently lacking. This work extends an ex- isting upper-level ontology and offers it as a foundation for evaluating and designing agent-oriented modeling languages. In particular, the pa- per focuses on the concept of goal, aiming at disambiguating its defini- tion, discussing its different manifestations, and clarifying its relation to other important agent-related concepts. For that, we examine how goals are conceived and used according to some relevant literature on agent- orientation. In addition, related work on akin fields, especially philosophy and AI are used as a basis for the proposed ontological extensions.

While traditional approaches in business process modelling tend to focus on “how” the business processes are performed (adopting a behavioural description in which business processes are described in terms of procedural aspects), in goal-oriented business process modelling [23][24][6], the proposals strive to extend traditional business process methodologies by providing a dimension of intentionality to the business processes. One of the difficulties in enabling goal-oriented business process modelling is the identification of goals. This paper reports on a study conducted in an organization in which we have obtained several goal models which were represented in Tropos methodology, each one corresponding to a business process also modelled in the scope of the study. A preliminary goal elicitation activity has been carried out for collecting an initial version of the goal models. After that, we have obtained a second version of the goal models by using the NFR catalogues as a tool in goal elicitation. We have found the NFR catalogues to be useful in goal elicitation, uncovering goals that did not arise during previous interviews.

Non-functional requirements (NFRs) have been the focus of research in Requirements Engineering (RE) for more than 20 years. Despite this attention, their ontological nature is still an open question, thereby hampering efforts to de- velop concepts, tools and techniques for eliciting, modeling, and analyzing them, in order to produce a specification for a system-to-be. In this paper, we propose to treat NFRs as qualities, based on definitions of the UFO foundational ontology. Furthermore, based on these ontological definitions, we provide guidelines for dis- tinguishing between non-functional and functional requirements, and sketch a syn- tax of a specification language that can be used for capturing NFRs.

En este artículo, se presenta una propuesta con base en MDWE (Model Driven Web Engineering) para soportar trazabilidad (elemento-a-elemento) aplicando modelos weaving. El método de diseño Web A-OOH (Adaptive Object Oriented
Hypermedia) es aplicado para representar el modelo de requisitos, equivalente al modelo independiente de computación (CIM) y los modelos conceptuales de dominio y navegación,
ambos representantes del modelo independiente de la plataforma (PIM) en contexto con Model-Driven Architecture (MDA).

Requirements Analysis are the most important part of Software Engineering for both System Application Development, and project requirements. Conflicts often arise during the requirements gathering and analysis phase. This research aims to identifying conflicts during requirements gathering phase in software development life cycle, Research, Development, and Technology converted the world into a global village. During requirements elicitation/gathering phase it's very difficult to understand the main objective of stakeholders, after completion of requirements elicitation task final results are used for Software Requirements Specification (SRS), SRS is the highly important outcome of the requirements analysis phase. this is the foundation between the developers and stakeholders or customers, proposed methodology will be helpful to identify those conflicts in very easy manner during the initial phase of the project.

Eliciting Flexible Goals or "soft goals", which are quality criteria according to language for modelling i-star requirements at different levels of abstraction, is not a trivial task, but the elicitation is extremely necessary for the identification of requirements for a non-functional system. As the processes of elicitation are not fully  delineated or are almost entirely ad-hoc, using an application based on knowledge
enabled solutions that made use of artificial intelligence facilitating the elicitation process. The TEKBS technique aimed at improving a sub activity, the Eri *c Method, that helped engineers with the requirements in the process of elicitation of Flexible Goals. To implement the TEKBS there were identified in the Expanded Definition Language (LAL) domain, application "soft actions" that were combined with the synonyms of the same extracted from the Wordnet thesaurus of the English language, generating a list of flexible candidate targets. These formed the basis of
facts related to the context of the problem, which was used by the inference machine CLIPS language, not only for the elicitation of explicit flexible goals, but also those that could be implied in the context of the problem. In addition, we created a matrix of influence of goals that used flexibility in its structure "flexible actions" and from them to check contributions. The results achieved through the application of the
TEKBS technique suggest that the use of artificial intelligence along with the partial automation of the Eri *c method adopted in this study to assist in the elicitation of the Flexible goals process, facilitating the process of learning, growth, separation, control and flexibility of the modelling process. Besides providing the most comprehensive engineering requirements, it also provides the possibility for better
requirements identified and easier verification of existing mutual influences between Flexible Goals. This is possible because the elicitation using TEKBS provides the engineering requirements of a greater number of targets that support flexibility in meeting the needs of those involved and still have the refinement of elicited requirements.

Recently, there has been a growing interest in self-adaptive systems. Roadmap papers in this area point to feedback loops as a promising way of operationalizing adaptivity in such systems. In this paper, we define a new type of requirement — called Awareness Requirement — that can refer to other requirements and their success/failures. We propose a way to elicit and formalize such requirements and offer a requirements monitoring framework to support them.

Continuous Delivery (CD) has emerged as an auspicious software development discipline, with the promise that it can provide the capability to release valuable software continuously to customers. Our organization has been implementing CD for the last two years. We have moved 22 software applications to CD. I noticed that CD has created a new context for architecting these software applications. This paper makes an initial attempt to answer the following questions: 1) what are the characteristics of this CD context; 2) why we want to architect for CD; and 3) what architecting for CD implies. The answers can provide fellow practitioners with insights for architecting their software applications for CD, and provide researchers with valuable input for developing their research agendas.

The i* community has raised several main dialects and dozens of variations in the definition of the i* language. Differences may be found related not just to the representation of new concepts but to the very core of the i* language. If on the one hand this is caused by large adoption of the framework in the academic setting, on the other hand, it also poses some threats. For example, novices have trouble learning how to use the language, and besides these inconsistencies prevent i* from being largely adopted in business settings. Based on positive results from previous work related to conceptual modeling languages, we believe that foundational ontologies may present a promising solution for this problem. Foundational ontologies may help clarifying the semantics of core i* constructs and provide practical guidelines for their use. Last, they may serve as the basis to propose a normative definition of the framework. In this paper, we develop this idea, first by justifying the use of foundational ontologies and, in particular, the UFO ontology. Then, we raise some problems found in the i* literature. And then, we show the outcomes of adopting an ontological approach for the specific case of the i* framework. We focus here on one of the most characteristic i* construct, namely the means-end link.

Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE)
methodologies are gaining prominence because of their ability to
overcome the drawbacks of traditional software development
techniques. The aim objective of this paper is to know the
intricacies of existing GORE literature which will help us in
identifying specific areas of scope for improvement. We discuss
the set of generic tasks which are part of a GORE methodology.
These tasks include goal elicitation, goal analysis, goal refinement and goal validation. Numerous methods have been proposed under these tasks. We also make an attempt to classify different methods proposed under GORE literature based on certain parameters or criteria. The report concludes by identifying gaps in specific areas of GORE literature and suggests possible ways to enhance the effectiveness of this methodology.

Context
A relevant question in requirements engineering is which set of functional requirements (FR) to prioritize and implement, while keeping non-functional requirements (NFR) balanced and optimized.

Objective
We aim to provide empirical evidence that requirement engineers may perform better at the task of selecting FRs while optimizing and balancing NFRs using an alternative (automated) i* post-processed model, compared to the original i* model.

Method
We performed a controlled experiment, designed to compare the original i* graphical notation, with our post-processed i* visualizations based on Pareto efficiency (a tabular and a radar chart visualization). Our experiment consisted of solving different exercises of various complexity for selecting FRs while balancing NFR. We considered the efficiency (time spent to correctly answer exercises), and the effectiveness (regarding time: time spent to solve exercises, independent of correctness; and regarding correctness of the answer, independent of time).

Results
The efficiency analysis shows it is 3.51 times more likely to solve exercises correctly with our tabular and radar chart visualizations than with i*. Actually, i* was the most time-consuming (effectiveness regarding time), had a lower number of correct answers (effectiveness regarding correctness), and was affected by complexity. Visual or textual preference of the subjects had no effect on the score. Beginners took more time to solve exercises than experts if i* is used (no distinction if our Pareto-based visualizations are used).

The success of software systems highly depends on user engagement. Thus, to deliver engaging systems, software has to be designed carefully taking into account Acceptance Requirements, such as " 70% of users will use the system " , and the psychological factors that could influence users to use the system. Analysis can then consider mechanisms that affect these factors, such as Gamification (making a game out of system use), advertising, incentives and more. We propose a Systematic Acceptance Requirements Analysis Framework based on Gamification for supporting the requirements engineer in analyzing and designing engaging software systems. Our framework, named Agon, encompasses both a methodology and a meta–model capturing acceptance and gamification knowledge. In this paper, we describe the Agon Meta–Model and provide examples from the gamification of a decision– making platform in the context of a European Project.

i* is a well known goal modeling framework, developed by a large and geographically dispersed research community. Currently, i* users tend to ascribe different and conflicting meanings to its constructs, leading to a non­ uniform use of the language, and consequently undermining its adoption. In previous works, we proposed ontological guidelines to support the creation of i* models, in an attempt to provide a solution to this problem. In this paper, we present an empirical study, to evaluate these ontological guidelines. Results show that for more experienced conceptual modelers, the ontological guidelines indeed support i* modeling. However, results are not as positive for non­experienced conceptual modelers.

En este artículo, se presenta una propuesta con base en MDWE (Model Driven Web Engineering) para soportar trazabilidad (elemento-a-elemento) aplicando modelos weaving. El método de diseño Web A-OOH (Adaptive Object Oriented Hypermedia) es aplicado para representar el modelo de requisitos, equivalente al modelo independiente de computación (CIM) y los modelos conceptuales de dominio y navegación, ambos representantes del modelo independiente de la plataforma (PIM) en contexto con Model-Driven Architecture (MDA).