Building Multi-View System Models for Requirements Engineering

This mini-tutorial overviews a blend of complementary techniques for constructing multi-view models for RE. Requirements engineering techniques are faced with a recurring problem of focus and structure. Elicitation techniques raise the problem of focussing and structuring elicitation sessions and artefacts. Evaluation techniques raise the problem of identifying and comparing items at a common level of abstraction and granularity for risk analysis, conflict management, option selection, or prioritization. Specification techniques offer mechanisms for structuring specifications but do not tell us much on how a complex structure should be built through such mechanisms. For quality assurance, inspection techniques are more effective if inspections can be focussed on structured specifications. Validation and verification techniques require the availability of structured specifications as well. Likewise, evolution techniques are more effective when a rich structure is available for defining change units, granularities of traceable items, built-in derivation links, and satisfaction arguments to be replayed in case of change.