Goal-oriented requirements animation

Requirements engineers need to make sure that the requirements models and specifications they are building do accurately capture what stakeholders really want. Requirements animation has been recognized to be a promising approach to support this. The principle is to simulate an executable version of the requirements model and to visualize the simulation in some form appealing to stakeholders. Most animation tools available to date simulate operational models. Such models in general do not directly reflect the objectives, constraints and assumptions stated declaratively by stakeholders. It is also not possible to focus the animation on particular portions of a complex model relevant to some specific concern. The paper describes a tool aimed at overcoming such limitations by animating goal-oriented requirements models. The tool automatically generates parallel state machines from goal operationalizations, instantiates those machines to specific instances created by users at animation time, executes them from concurrent events input by multiple users, monitors property violations at animation time, and visualizes concurrent simulations in terms of animated scenes in the domain.