Requirements Analyses Integrating Goals and Problem Analysis Techniques

One of the difficulties that goal-oriented requirements analyses encounters is that the efficiency of the goal refinement is based on the analysts' subjective knowledge and experience. To improve the efficiency of the requirements elicitation process, engineers need approaches with more systemized analysis techniques. This paper integrates the goal-oriented requirements language i* with concepts from a structured problem analysis notation, problem frames (PF). The PF approach analyzes software design as a contextualized problem which has to respond to constraints imposed by the environment. The proposed approach is illustrated using the meeting scheduler exemplar. Results show that integration of the goal and the problem analysis enables simultaneous consideration of the designer's subjective intentions and the physical environmental constraints.