A Unification of the Essence of Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering

Goal-oriented requirements engineering has been extensively studied and it certainly has a lot of appeal and potential. However, it is not (yet) in wide-spread industrial use. We conjecture as a major reason that the existing approaches are somewhat isolated and generally too complex. The latter reason makes them difficult to apply in real-world projects. Therefore, we distill the essence of goal-oriented requirements engineering and unify it in a simple and comprehensive approach. We also connect it with more common approaches like scenario based requirements engineering (including use cases). As another step towards better applicability, we define a metamodel for a modeling language that allows representing all kinds of goals and their relationships in UML style.