Towards Integrating Human-Centric Characteristics into the Goal-Oriented Requirements Language

Abstract

In Requirements Engineering (RE), goal-oriented techniques have captured significant attention due to their ability to bridge the gap between stakeholders’ goals and the means by which these goals can be achieved. However, current goal-oriented modeling frameworks suffer from the lack of an in-depth and thorough understanding of human-centric requirements during the design and modelling of the system. Human-centric characteristics of users are mainly related to user’s gender, culture, language, age, personality traits, emotions, and any special requirements stemmed from physical and/or mental impairments. These aspects are vital, and they play an essential role in the acceptance and usage of the developed systems. Hence, neglecting or oversighting such characteristics while designing and modeling a system will lead to ineffective and hard to use systems for some end users. This paper proposes a vision for integrating human-centric characteristics into goal modeling, with the latter being one of the most important early activities in requirements engineering. We aim to characterize the different aspects of human-centric characteristics (which we call them user profiles), and to provide a framework for the systematic integration of user profiles with goal modeling. This in turn will help identify and prioritize critical human-centric characteristics of end users, which will affect the design, modelling, and development of systems. We thus propose a long-term research agenda and urge community contributions in this research direction to achieve enhanced human-centric modelling.