From Requirements to Architectural Design - Using Goals and Scenarios (Liu & Yu)
Today I'd like to comment this brilliant paper from Liu & Yu. I couldn't stop reading it and I think it is just a must for whoever is interested in Software Engineering and/or KM (business process) methodological support, like myself. Just check how well their use of goals is justified in the following paragraph: "In general, goals describe the objectives that the system should achieve through the cooperation of agents in the software-to-be and in the environment. It captures "why" the data and functions are there, and whether they are sufficient for achieving the high-level objectives that arise naturally in the requirements engineering process."
On the other hand, as the methodology proposed in my work also applies goals also for making explicit the objectives of humans and institutions involved in an organizational setting, I'd give a few more reasons for it:
- analysing human and institutional goals helps the business analyst to find inconsistencies among the real aims of an individual (or even a whole department) and the objectives that have been attributed to it by the organizational management;
- this analysis also allows us to find some unbalanced dependencies that may cause problems, such as the lack of motivation by one party to meet the goals delegated by another;
- the explicitation of human and institutional goals supports a kind of tracing back action, in case something goes wrong in the process, in order to find out why the clash occurred (not with the intention of punishing anyone, but rather aiming at correction of mistakes).
If you would like to learn more about the methodology we propose, please refer to the paper "Providing Knowledge Management Support to Communities of Practice through Agent-oriented Analysis. ", written in collaboration with Anna Perini and Virginia Dignum and presented at i-know'04.
Back to Liu & Yu's paper, I also found quite interesting the idea of combining scenarios and goals and this made me consider the possibility of applying use cases in our methodology. Maybe this is something worth discussing with Gerd, Virginia and Anna...
On the other hand, as the methodology proposed in my work also applies goals also for making explicit the objectives of humans and institutions involved in an organizational setting, I'd give a few more reasons for it:
- analysing human and institutional goals helps the business analyst to find inconsistencies among the real aims of an individual (or even a whole department) and the objectives that have been attributed to it by the organizational management;
- this analysis also allows us to find some unbalanced dependencies that may cause problems, such as the lack of motivation by one party to meet the goals delegated by another;
- the explicitation of human and institutional goals supports a kind of tracing back action, in case something goes wrong in the process, in order to find out why the clash occurred (not with the intention of punishing anyone, but rather aiming at correction of mistakes).
If you would like to learn more about the methodology we propose, please refer to the paper "Providing Knowledge Management Support to Communities of Practice through Agent-oriented Analysis. ", written in collaboration with Anna Perini and Virginia Dignum and presented at i-know'04.
Back to Liu & Yu's paper, I also found quite interesting the idea of combining scenarios and goals and this made me consider the possibility of applying use cases in our methodology. Maybe this is something worth discussing with Gerd, Virginia and Anna...
posted by Renata S. S. Guizzardi at
14:01
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