From Early Requirements to Late Requirements: A goal-based approach1

At present, the software engineering community places emphasis on the relevance of understanding the organizational context before starting the development of an information system. In this context, several research works focus on proposing mechanisms to generate information systems from early requirements specifications in an agent-based approach. However, only a few research works offer a guided process for carrying out the equivalence between the organizational and requirements models. In this paper, a methodological approach for deriving the software system functionality from organizational models is presented. In the proposed method, the organizational goals are the basis for determining the relevant plans to be automated with a software system. A pattern language is also used to systematically carry out the equivalence between the organizational and late requirements models. The Tropos Framework (which is one of the most well-founded, agent-oriented methodologies) is used to represent the organizational environment. By proposing rules to perform the model transformation process, we go a step further in the process of including organizational modeling as a key piece in the software production process