Elicitation of Goals in Requirements Engineering Using Agile Methods

Abstract

Several agile software development approaches have been proposed and largely used in practice. All agile processes resolve a paradox of requirements engineering –the need to formulate a clear vision of a system in a world of constantly changing requirements. The fundamental principle underlying requirements engineering is the assumption that a system should be clearly specified before its design and implementation. The Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering method identifies the requirements in terms of goals which are well understood by the stakeholders and the goals are generally extracted from the stakeholders. But extracting these goals is a challenging task in the goal oriented methods. In the present paper, we propose an Agile Technique for Agent Based Goal Elicitation (ATABGE), based on the mechanisms of agile practices and approaches, for extracting the goals from stakeholders. While extracting the goals, the high level goals are decomposed/refined/broken to get the lower level goals/sub-goals involving active participation of stakeholders through the process of Goal decomposition/refinement/splitting involving Agents. The methodology is validated through a case study.