Measurement of Actor External Dependencies in GRL Models

Goal models represent interests, intentions, and strategies of different stakeholders in early requirements engineering. When capturing requirements of socio-technical systems, goal models evolve quickly to become large and complex. Hence, understanding and maintaining such goal models become more challenging. Software engineering metric-based approaches have shown good potential in measuring software designs. In this paper, we propose a structural metric to measure actor external dependencies in GRL (Goal-oriented Requirement Language) models. We illustrate our approach by applying our metric to a goal model describing undergraduate students’ involvement in research activities.