Keynote 2

Goals displacement is the process by which the means used to achieve a goal become more important than the goal itself. The goal of a company is to create value for its stakeholders (whether shareholders, employees, customers, society, etc). When a company endeavors to build or acquire software (or a system or a service), whether to use internally or sell to a third party, its goal is to support the larger company goal of creating value. Thus, for example, when a company builds or acquires a CRM system, its purpose is likely to accomplish some combination of increasing revenues or decreasing costs. The goal of requirements engineering (or requirements management) is to increase the likelihood that the end product of the endeavor does in fact create value. Without RE, a company is more likely to expend short-term resources without ever receiving a shortor long-term benefit to its stakeholders. In the early 1960\´s the term "requirements analysis" was introduced to help system developers be more successful at creating value. Yet, in the 50 years hence, a huge percentage of RE research and RE practitioner efforts seem oblivious to the original goal. Instead, we see displaced goals like: create a perfect software requirements specification (SRS); check an SRS for some combination of completeness, consistency, non-ambiguity, etc; automatically generate (or analyze) some formalized modeling notation; follow an onerous 20-step process; or automatically transform one modeling notation into another. Woefully few (although there are some terrific exceptions!) published papers connect the requirements process with its real goal: value creation.