Goal Based Requirements Analysis Using WebURN

Abstract

Web applications have specific functional and non-functional requirements owing to their worldwide presence and heterogeneous audience. It has been proved that including NFRs from early requirements analysis builds a product that needs lesser changes, is coherent with the expectations of stakeholders and reduces the design and development flaws. The existing Web engineering approaches, however, fail to analyze the non-functional requirements and their influence on the system. User Requirements Notation is a standard that combines goals, softgoals and scenarios for early requirements analysis. URN is a combination of Goal Requirements Language (GRL) which annotates goal modeling and UCM (use case maps) for depicting scenarios. In this paper we initially present, Web specific User Requirements Notation (WebURN), an enhancement of User Requirements Notation for Web specific functional and non-functional requirements, which is driven by goals and softgoals. The WebURN notation likewise, consists of WebGRL notation and WebUCM notation. In our framework, first, the goals and softgoals are captured and represented using base WebGRL diagram. Thereafter, it is refined in detail for every functional requirement. Simultaneously, the softgoals corresponding to each functionality based requirement are also analyzed. Finally, the WebGRL and WebUCM diagrams are validated and checked for any inconsistencies. Additionally, to support the Requirements engineer throughout the process, guidance is provided on the development of Goal driven Requirements Analysis diagrams based on WebURN. A tool has been developed to automate the above stated steps.