CRII: SHF: RUI: Representing and Merging Diverse Goal Models in Requirements Engineering

Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) is an established method to help involved parties ("stakeholders") capture and determine the early-context for a new or modified software product. Through a central artifact called a goal model, engineers visualize the goals and dependencies of both the system under consideration and the project stakeholders.

By creating goal models, engineers can reason about project trade-offs and how stakeholder goals and dependencies may evolve. Prior work assumes that only a single individual creates a goal model. This project has two research objectives.

First, the project aims to enable multiple modelers to gather features from stakeholders separately and merge them into a single model for analysis. By merging goal models, practitioners may collaborate and capture additional perspectives leading to a more complete representation of the project, with inconsistencies and conflicts being resolved in the process.

Second, the project aims to improve the usability of trade-off analysis and make analysis techniques more accessible to stakeholders. By providing stakeholders with more realistic models, practitioners can make better informed decisions, which in turn provides society with higher quality software. The project will contribute to the teaching of GORE modeling, an important part of software-engineering education.

In this project, the investigators aim to support stakeholders' ability to collaborate in GORE activities, specifically the creation and analysis of large goal models. Researchers investigate integrating the viewpoints of multiple stakeholders for models with timing information by merging model syntax and model semantics. In a second research activity, the investigators improve the interpretation of analysis results and define a methodology for applying GORE reasoning, which supports stakeholders in decision making.

For example, this project combines color visualizations with filtering analysis results to narrow the state-space of potential solutions. The project will provide tool support for model-management features, such as traceability links to validate the provenance of the merge operation. The research team will validate the effectiveness of the merge operation and analysis visualization through empirical observations of modelers.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.