Rolland

Goal Driven Requirements Engineering for Purposeful Systems Design
Colette ROLLAND, Professor, Université Paris I - Panthéon Sorbonne, France

Colette ROLLAND is currently Professor of Computer Science in the department of Mathematics and Informatics at the University of PARIS-1 Pantheon/Sorbonne where she has worked since 1979.
Her research interests lie in the areas of information modelling, databases, temporal data modelling, object-oriented analysis and design, requirement engineering, design methodologies and CASE tools. She is Director of the Centre de Recherche en Informatique and supervises a team of 10 full time assistant-professors and 15 research students that are active in these areas. She has supervised 60 PhD thesis and has an extensive experience in leading research projects and conducting co-operative projects with the industry.
Professor Colette ROLLAND is the originator of the REMORA methodology for the analysis, design and realisation of Information Systems. She is the co-author of 5 textbooks, editor of 12 proceedings/books and author or co-author of over 150 invited and referred papers. She is in the editorial board of the Journal of Information Systems, the Journal on Information and Software Technology, the Journal of Requirements Engineering, the Journal of data and Knowledge Engineering and the Journal of Intelligent Information Systems. She is in the board of AFCET, the French Computer Society, the French representative in IFIP TC8 on Information Systems and was the chairperson of the IFIP WG8.1 from 1995 to 1998.

rolland@univ.paris1.fr

Abstract

A number of recent surveys tend to show that IT engineers are able to develop information systems technically sound but encounter difficulties to design systems that meet the needs of their users. The challenge of requirements engineering is to contribute to the development of purposeful systems.
Requirements Engineering (RE) aims at abstracting from the wishes, expectations, objectives and needs of a user community the requirements specification of the software system that shall support them. RE is mainly concerned by the Why and What questions : during the RE activity it is necessary to understand Why a system needs to be developed and What the system shall do. The hope behind modelling the Why dimension is to develop systems better fitting the needs of their users and the expectations of the organisation stakeholders. Modelling the Why is also important in a changing world in order to provide the conceptual link between the system and its environment.
The paper will overview state-of-the-art RE approaches to address the Why question and will open the discussion on which extend those really meet the challenge of RE.