Goal-directed concept acquisition in requirements elicitation

Requirements analysis includes an acquisition step where a global model for the specification of the system and its environment is elaborated. This model involves concepts that are usually not found in the final formal specification, such as goals to be achieved, agents and their responsibilities, etc. The authors present an approach for model acquisition which is driven by such goals. They describe a conceptual meta-model in terms of which requirements models are acquired. The acquisition strategy can be viewed as a systematic way to traversing this meta-model backwards from the goals. The goal-directed acquisition strategy and the use of the meta-model are illustrated with a case study, the specification of a simple elevator system