Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering: A Case Study in E-government

This paper presents a requirements engineering framework based on the notions of Actor, Goal, and Intentional Dependency, and applies it to a case study in the field of Information Systems for e-Government. The framework provides the analyst with a powerful tool for capturing high-level organizational needs and transforming them into system requirements in a smooth and controlled manner, and for redesigning, at the same time, the organizational structure that better exploit the new system. Organizations are modeled using Actors. Thus, a network of interacting actors form the organization model. These actors collaborate or conflict in their efforts to achieve individual or organizational goals. Goals represent relationships between actors and link organizational needs to system requirements. In comparison with other more articulated actorand goal-centered approaches to requirements and software engineering, the proposed framework adopts only a basic set of notational elements, and introduces a simplified, top-down, decomposition-based, analysis process. This approach greatly enhances stakeholders’ acceptance and understanding, that are crucial factors for the success of real projects, especially when very diverse stakeholders, with very different skills and backgrounds, are involved, as in the case of e-Government projects. The definition of the requirements for an Electronic Record Management System for e-Government is used to illustrate the framework.