Goal and Requirement Change Management

in Enterprise Architecture

Abelneh Teka

13, June 2012

22/03/2012 2

Background

•A Computer Science master student at

University of Twente, Netherlands.

•This research plan is based on the early

works of my

on going master Project.•Master Project: Analysis of Indirect

Influence Relations.

•4 Supervisors Involved in this project and deserve

credit:

•Nelly Condori Fernandez and Ivan Kurtev: From

University of Twente

•Wilco Engelsman and Dick Quartel: From BiZZdesign.

. Conducted on the Premise of BiZZdesign B.V.

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Research Context: Enterprise Architecture(EA) and Goal change management.

•Business environments and Processes are highly dynamic.

•Technology supporting/enabling these processes is also highly dynamic.

• But “important” changes are manifested as changes in stakeholders’ goals and requirements.

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•EA designs should also be adaptable to cope with these changes to sustain the intended functionality of the EA.

•Changes in business environments can be triggered by various events. e.g. business Law changes, company

policy changes, Government policy changes, technology advancements….

• Bottom Line: Goal change management is crucial for EA adaptability.

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Industrial Context: BiZZdesign, ArchiMate and TOGAF

•BiZZdesign is a company in Netherlands involved in business process and EA designs as well as tool support and consultation for client organizations. •For EA design, it uses TOGAF and

ArchiMate EA modeling language.

•Both ArchiMate and TOGAF support modeling of requirements and other intentional elements like goals and stakeholders.

•BiZZdesign has also a tool named BiZZdesign Architect to design EA models via ArchiMate EA modeling language.

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Industrial Problem:

• The goal to goal relations are not semantically well defined in ArchiMate.

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• Can’t predict goal change effects ≈ Limited Adaptability of EA.

• Limited Decision Support Alternate resource allocation problem.

• No Semantic definition ≈ No reasoning on goal Relations.

• No Reasoning ≈ Can’t predict goal change impacts.

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Industrial Problem: Simple Example

Should the company manger hire a tester or a marketer?

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• What are the existing formalizations of the goal oriented approaches, and what kind of reasoning do they allow?

Research Questions

• Is the reasoning for indirect influence possible with them(after modification)?

• How the previous two can be combined and extended to support analysis of alternative resource allocations?

• How can we visualize these change impacts and how can we simulate this visualization?

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Research Approach

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• Goal and Requirement change management is not a new topic for the software engineering community.

e.g. NFR, KAOS, TROPOS, DEPRIVSIM, First order logic based definition of goal relations.

• Research Question 1• Two candidate approaches are selected/adapted: based on Simplicity for users, applicability for indirect goal influence analysis, documentation availability and complexity for development:

Non Functional Requirement FrameworkTROPOS based approach

What are the most relevant existing formalizations of the goal oriented

approaches?

• Research Question 2.

REFSQ:2012 11

Non functional Requirements as soft goals. Goals can be partially or Fully satisfied as well as Denied.

Contribution relations can be Strongly positive, weakly positive as well as negative.

Non Functional Reuirements Frameweork

Individual Impact of offspring with label:

Upon Parent label, given off-spring parent contribution types

Break( --) HURT (-) ? HELP(+) Make(++)

Denied(D) S PS U PD D

Conflicting (C) C C U C C

Unknown(U) U U U U U

Satisfied(S) D PD U PS S

REFSQ:2012 12

• NFR’s qualitative Reasoning can be extended using Fuzzy logic based inference engine.

What kind of reasoning do these approaches allow? : Fuzzy Reasoning

Soft(Goal) satisfaction level measurement is difficult.

Vague nature of soft(goals).

Fuzzy logic can be applicable on these kind of vague(fuzzy) concepts.

A single element in a fuzzy set can belong to two sets.

e.g: 10 °C, Warm or Cold temperature? -85, Fully or Partially Denied?

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• TROPOS: Agent oriented software development methodology.Supports early phases of requirement engineering

activities. Each Goal is assigned two variables: one for

satisfiability and the other for deniability.The variables can only take Full(F), Partial(P) or

None (N) evidence availability for Goal Satisfiability and Deniability.

What kind of reasoning do these approaches allow? : TROPOS

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Preliminary Software Architecture:

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22/03/2012REFSQ:2012 15

What kind of reasoning is applicable for indirect influence management? : Preliminary Empirical Study Design

• How efficient and effective is the algorithm proposed in comparison to other existing approaches?

• Is the efficiency and effectiveness of the algorithm proposed affected by the functional size of “goal model”?

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Current Status of the Research:

•Both approach seems to be consistent when

applied to one

test case study.

•Performance wise, the two approaches behave

similarly

Prototype application of TROPOS and fuzzy logic based NFR reasoning approaches is realized.(RQ 4)

Future Work

•Combining good features of both approaches

(RQ3)

•More test cases for validating the selected

method

•TROPOS is better in handling conflicts.

•Fuzzy Reasoning gives more detailed and

concrete predictions.

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Do you have any question?

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So what do we expect from the PROFES community again?

• About the reasoning technique selected for goal analysis.

• Possible validation approaches in addition to example test cases.

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