Requirements engineering for e-business advantage

Abstract

As a means of contributing to the achievement of business advantage for companies engaging in e-business, we propose a requirements engineering framework that incorporates a business strategy dimension. We employ Jackson’s Problem Frames approach, goal modeling, and business process modeling (BPM) to achieve this. Jackson’s context diagrams, used to represent business model context, are integrated with goal models to describe the requirements of the business strategy. We leverage the paradigm of projection in both approaches as a means of simultaneously decomposing both the requirement and context parts, from an abstract business level to concrete system requirements. Our approach maintains traceability to high-level business objectives via contribution relationship links in the goal model. We integrate use of role activity diagrams to describe business processes in detail where needed. The feasibility of our approach is shown by a well-known case study taken from the literature.