Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundations for Software Quality (REFSQ’05). A Goal-Based Round-Trip Method for System Development

Abstract. In most cases information system development can be seen as an exercise of business process reengineering, either because it automates some human-based processes or because a legacy system is going to be replaced. From this point of view, we can say that the specification of the system-to-be goes from the observation and analysis of the current system to the specification of the system-to-be, going through the construction and evaluation of alternatives. Goal-oriented models are a valuable formalism to support the strategic analysis of the current process. In this paper, we propose a method supporting that round-trip engineering process, focusing in the prescriptive construction of strategic i * models and the systematic generation of alternatives. Several requirements engineering techniques are used in order to model the existing process, which allow a reliable generation and evaluation of alternatives as well as the reuse of strategic knowledge for information system development.