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Towards an approach for analysing the strategic alignment of software requirements using quantified goal graphs

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journal contribution
posted on 2013-07-24, 09:31 authored by Richard Ellis-Braithwaite, Russell LockRussell Lock, Ray DawsonRay Dawson, Badr Haque
Analysing the strategic alignment of software requirements primarily provides assurance to stakeholders that the software-to-be will add value to the organisation. Additionally, such analysis can improve a requirement by disambiguating its purpose and value, thereby supporting validation and value-oriented decisions in requirements engineering processes, such as prioritisation, release planning, and trade-off analysis. We review current approaches that could enable such an analysis. We focus on Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering methodologies, since goal graphs are well suited for relating software goals to business goals. However, we argue that unless the extent of goal-goal contribution is quantified with verifiable metrics, goal graphs are not sufficient for demonstrating the strategic alignment of software requirements. Since the concept of goal contribution is predictive, what results is a forecast of the benefits of implementing software requirements. Thus, we explore how the description of the contribution relationship can be enriched with concepts such as uncertainty and confidence, non-linear causation, and utility. We introduce the approach using an example software project from Rolls-Royce.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Computer Science

Citation

ELLIS-BRAITHWAITE, R. ... et al, 2013. Towards an approach for analysing the strategic alignment of software requirements using quantified goal graphs. International Journal on Advances in Software, 6 (2), pp.119-130.

Publisher

IARIA © the authors

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publication date

2013

Notes

This article was published in the International Journal on Advances in Software under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-SA licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/).

ISSN

1942-2628

Language

  • en