Capability as Requirement Metaphor

Requirement Engineering (RE) has become an attractive field in both industry and academic. Many RE approaches have been presented in the past years to support eliciting, modeling, analyzing and specifying requirements of system to be built. However, requirement characteristics of kinds of systems like large scale software intensive systems pose several issues to requirements analysis and therefore challenge the extant RE approaches. This paper investigates a number of important metaphors in RE and proposes a novel RE approach that adopts capability as requirement metaphor. We discuss the requirements challenges coming from the changes of system-to-be and argue the necessity to introduce new abstraction and technology into RE to deal with the problems. The notions of capability and the reason to adopt capability as requirement metaphor are analyzed. The meta-model and framework of capability-based requirement engineering is proposed. A case is also studied in order to illustrate our approach. Capability as new abstraction in RE provides a new way to represent, analyze and tradeoff requirements.