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Goal-directed elaboration of requirements for a meeting scheduler: problems and lessons learnt

Recently a number of requirements engineering languages and methods have flourished that not only address 'what' questions but also 'why', 'who' and 'when' questions. The objective of the paper is twofold: to assess the strengths and weaknesses of one of these methodologies on a nontrivial benchmark; and to illustrate and discuss a number of challenging issues that need to be addressed for such methodologies to become effective in supporting real, complex requirements engineering tasks. The problem considered here is that of a distributed meeting scheduler system; the methodology considered is the KAOS goal directed language and method. The issues raised from this case study include goal identification, the "deidelization" of unachievable goals, the handling of interfering goals, the impact of early formal reasoning, the merits of early reuse of abstract descriptions and categories, requirements traceability and the need to link requirements to retractable assumptions, and the potential benefits of hybrid acquisition strategies.