Using the RITA Threats Ontology to Guide Requirements Elicitation: an Empirical Experiment in the Banking Sector

Eliciting requirements is an important issue of systems development projects. One particular approach to requirements elicitation is to analyse non nominal cases of systems behaviour. Non nominal behaviours can be dealt with under different perspectives such as obstacles, conflicts, or risks. RITA is a requirements elicitation method that makes use of an ontology, which englobes these different perspectives using the concept of threat. The threats ontology can be used to diagnose non nominal system behaviours, and discover new requirements to overcome them. This paper reports an empirical experiment of the RITA threats ontology in the banking sector. The experiment was undertaken with the goal to demonstrate the effectiveness of using the RITA threats ontology to discover system requirements. The paper describes the experiment, reports a few results, and raises a few questions to address in the development of ontology-based requirements engineering methods.