Improving Requirements Engineering through Goal-Oriented Models and Tools : Feedback from a Large Industrial Deployment

Nowadays, mastering the requirements phase is still challenging for companies of any size and often impacts the quality, delay or cost of the delivered software system. While smaller companies may suffer from maturity, resource or tooling problems, larger companies have to cope with the larger size, complexity and cross-dependencies between their projects.

This paper reports about the work carried out over the past three years in support of the Respect-IT walloon company to address such challenges within Huawei, a very large Chinese company active worldwide in the high-tech and telecommunication sectors, with the help of experts from the requirements engineering community.

We show how goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE) is able to provide a strong foundation to support the evolution of requirements engineering practices and also in connection with related processes such as business analysis, technical specification and testing. We also report about our experience in developing adequate tool support to achieve successful industrial adoption and address team-work, scalability and toolchain integration needs.
Although anchored in a specific case, most of the reported issues are shared by many companies in many domains. To further abstract away from our case, we also formulate some "Chinese wisdom" learned, identify useful strategies for successful technology transfer and point further research challenges.

Voir en ligne : http://www.icsoft.org