Les exigences techniques.

Requirements Engineering in the Year 00: A Research Perspective

Axel van Lamsweerde

Département d’Ingénierie Informatique

Université catholique de Louvain

B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium)

avl@info.ucl.ac.be

ABSTRACT

Requirements engineering (RE) is concerned with the identification

of the goals to be achieved by the envisioned system,

the operationalization of such goals into services and

constraints, and the assignment of responsibilities for the

resulting requirements to agents such as humans, devices,

and software. The processes involved in RE include

domain analysis, elicitation, specification, assessment,

negotiation, documentation, and evolution. Getting highquality

requirements is difficult and critical. Recent surveys

have confirmed the growing recognition of RE as an area of

utmost importance in software engineering research and

practice.

The paper presents a brief history of the main concepts and

techniques developed to date to support the RE task, with a

special focus on modeling as a common denominator to all

RE processes. The initial description of a complex safetycritical

system is used to illustrate a number of current

research trends in RE-specific areas such as goal-oriented

requirements elaboration, conflict management, and the

handling of abnormal agent behaviors. Opportunities for

goal-based architecture derivation are also discussed

together with research directions to let the field move

towards more disciplined habits.

1. INTRODUCTION

Software requirements have been repeatedly recognized

during the past 25 years to be a real problem. In their early

empirical study, Bell and Thayer observed that inadequate,

inconsistent, incomplete, or ambiguous requirements are

numerous and have a critical impact on the quality of the

resulting software [Bel76]. Noting this for different kinds of

projects, they concluded that “the requirements for a system

do not arise naturally; instead, they need to be engineered

and have continuing review and revision”. Boehm estimated

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