A business-oriented approach to requirements elicitation

"The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding precisely what to build" (Brooks, 1987). Faulty requirements analysis is a major reason for project failure or unsatisfactory information systems that do not fulfill business needs. Although it has been long recognized that system requirements can only be understood within the context of the business processes and business modeling has become the initial phase of most software processes, the transition between business modeling and requirements gathering is still a challenge for research. Moreover, existing work in this area tends to introduce accidental difficulties. This paper reports the results of an action research conducted for elaborating a Business-Oriented approach to Requirements Elicitation. Our approach integrates Requirements Engineering with Business Process Engineering and derives system requirements based on business process models. This ensures that system requirements meet real business needs. The proposed approach is illustrated by a real-world example.