Organizational Patterns for Early Requirements Analysis

Early requirements analysis is concerned with modeling and understanding the organizational context within which a software system will operate. Such organizational models can describe either the status quo or a desired new status. It is convenient to build such models by deploying organizational patterns which describe oftenused organizational structures. The paper proposes a catalogue of patterns which adopt concepts from organization theory and strategic alliances literature. The patterns are modeled using the i* framework which offers the notions of actor, goal and actor dependency and specified in Telos. Each proposed pattern is evaluated with respect to a set of quality attributes, such as predictability, adaptability and openness. We illustrate the use of our proposed patterns with a business-tobusiness example modeling alternative organizational settings. This research has been conducted within the context of a comprehensive software development methodology called Tropos.