Viewpoint Based Problem Modeling Technique and Its Application

Abstract

Jackson’s Problem Frame (PF) approach emphasizes the importance of modeling and analyzing the world outside of computer before drifting into designing solutions. Furthermore, it uses problem diagram to vividly capture requirements, problem domains, and their relation in an intuitive and structural way. After visualizing the problem, it provides a solid foundation for communication between software stakeholders, decreasing the possibility of mismatch between customer’s real needs and software system developers’ understanding of customer needs. Thus PF approach is a useful tool in Requirement Engineering (RE). While today’s development activities of complex system invariably deeply roots in large scare problem context and involves various kinds of stakeholder who have different perspectives or viewpoints on the problem they are addressing. It is vital to explicitly represent and analyze these viewpoints, their relationships, then integrate them into a complete and consistent form to ease further overall architecture design and development. This paper explores the integration of viewpoint concepts with problem frames methodology which aim at providing a more flexible and practical way to express requirements from different classes of stakeholders and the problem context they concerned, then, we integrate these viewpoint based sub-problem together to provide basis for subsequent phrases in software life cycle.