Guiding the requirements engineering process

Despite a constant improvement in automation in CASE environments, the level of guidance provided to developers is still low, especially in the early phases of information systems engineering. We argue in this paper that a more effective guidance to requirements engineers can be based on a process meta-model which allows us to deal with a large variety of situations in a flexible, decision-oriented manner and supports different levels of granularity in decision making. The paper presents the process guidance meta-model and shows how it can guide the requirements engineer punctuality-to take the right decision in the adequate situation-as well as globally, to control the decision flow