Innovative e-commerce ideas are characterised by commercial products yet unknown to the market, enabled by information technology such as the Internet and technologies on top of it. How to develop such products is hardly known. We propose an interdisciplinary approach, e3-value, to explore an innovative e-commerce idea with the aim of understanding such an idea thoroughly and evaluating it for potential profitability. Our methodology exploits a requirements engineering way of working, but employs concepts and terminology from business science, marketing and axiology. It shows how to model business requirements and improve business---IT alignment, in sophisticated multi-actor value constellations that are common in electronic commerce. In addition to the e3-value approach methodology, we also present the action research-based development of our methodology, by using one of the longitudinal projects we carried out in the field of online news article provisioning.

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Value-based requirements engineering: exploring innovative e-commerce ideas

Even though goal modeling is an effective approach to requirements engineering, it is known to present a number of difficulties in practice. The paper discusses these difficulties and proposes to couple goal modeling and scenario authoring to overcome them. Whereas existing techniques use scenarios to concretize goals, we use them to discover goals. Our proposal is to define enactable rules which form the basis of a software environment called L'Ecritoire to guide the requirements elicitation process through interleaved goal modeling and scenario authoring. The focus of the paper is on the discovery of goals from scenarios. The discovery process is centered around the notion of a requirement chunk (RC) which is a pair . The paper presents the notion of RC, the rules to support the discovery of RCs and illustrates the application of the approach within L'Ecritoire using the ATM example. It also evaluates the potential practical benefits expected from the use of the approach.

Guiding goal modeling using scenarios

Scenario based approaches are becoming ubiquitous in systems analysis and design but remain vague in definition and scope. A survey of current practices indicates we must offer better means for structuring, managing, and developing their use in diverse contexts. The European Esprit project Crews (Cooperative Requirements Engineering with Scenarios) are seeking a deeper understanding of scenario diversity, necessary to improve methodological and tool support for scenario based requirements engineering. They follow a two pronged strategy to gain this understanding. First, following the "3 dimensions" requirements engineering framework developed in the precursor Nature project (K. Pohl, 1994), they developed a scenario classification framework based on a comprehensive survey of scenario literature in requirements engineering, human computer interaction, and other fields. They used the framework to classify 11 prominent scenario based approaches. Secondly, to complement this research framework, they investigated scenario applications in industrial projects through site visits with scenario user projects. The article focuses on these site visits. It was found that while many companies express interest in Jacobson's use case approach, actual scenario usage often falls outside what is described in textbooks and standard methodologies. Users therefore face significant scenario management problems not yet addressed adequately in theory or practice, and are demanding solutions to these problems.

Scenarios in system development: current practice

map as well as its associated guidelines. The map is a navigational structure which supports the dynamic selection of the intention to be achieved next and the appropriate strategy to achieve it, whereas guidelines help in the operationalisation of the selected intention. The paper presents the map and guidelines and exemplifies the approach using the CREWS-L’Ecritoire method for requirements engineering.

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A Multi-Model View of Process Modelling

This brilliant textbook explains in detail the principles of conceptual modeling independently from particular methods and languages and shows how to apply them in real-world projects. The author covers all aspects of the engineering process from structural modeling over behavioral modeling to meta-modeling, and completes the presentation with an extensive case study based on the osCommerce system. Written for computer science students in classes on information systems modeling as well as for professionals feeling the need to formalize their experiences or to update their knowledge, Oliv delivers here a comprehensive treatment of all aspects of the modeling process. His book is complemented by lots of exercises and additional online teaching material.

Conceptual Modeling of Information Systems

The requirements engineering, information systems and software engineering communities recently advocated scenario-based approaches which emphasise the user/system interaction perspective in developing computer systems. Use of examples, scenes, narrative descriptions of contexts, mock-ups and prototypes-all these ideas can be called scenario-based approaches, although exact definitions are not easy beyond stating that these approaches emphasise some description of the real world. Experience seems to tell us that people react to ‘real things’ and that this helps in clarifying requirements. Indeed, the widespread acceptance of prototyping in system development points to the effectiveness of scenario-based approaches. However, we have little understanding about how scenarios should be constructed, little hard evidence about their effectiveness and even less idea about why they work. The paper is an attempt to explore some of the issues underlying scenario-based approaches in requirements engineering and to propose a framework for their classification. The framework is a four-dimensional framework which advocates that a scenario-based approach can be well defined by itsform, content, purpose andlife cycle. Every dimension is itself multifaceted and a metric is associated with each facet. Motivations for developing the framework are threefold: (a) to help in understanding and clarifying existing scenario-based approaches; (b) to situate the industrial practice of scenarios; and (c) to assist researchers develop more innovative scenario-based approaches.

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A proposal for a scenario classification framework

This paper presents an overview of the process theory developed in the context of the ESPRIT project NATURE.1 This theory proposes means for modelling and engineering the requirements engineering (RE) process. The key element of this theory is a situation-and decision-based process meta-model independent of any RE methodology. The process meta-model acts as a shell for defining process models by instantiation. An enactment mechanism implemented in a tool environment has been defined. It allows execution of process models and provides effective guidance to the requirements engineer. Construction of process models is also supported based on generic method knowledge chunks. The formalization of our approach is based on a free algebra.

Modelling and engineering the requirements engineering process: An overview of the NATURE approach

A pervasive, but not well-studied phenomenon in every-day systems development is the use of examples, scenes, narrative descriptions of context, mock-ups and prototypes. Loosely all these ideas can be called scenario-based approaches, although an exact definition is not easy beyond saying that all these techniques emphasize some description of the real world. Recently such approaches have begun to attract considerable attention in Requirements Engineering (RE), Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information Systems (IS) research. While from the research point of view there are now first attempts to provide a comprehensive classification of the state of the art in scenario-based approaches [Rolland et al. 97], little is known on the practical relevance of these techniques, i.e. studies on the current state of the practice are still missing so far.

Scenario Use in European Software Organizations - Results from Site Visits and Questionnaires*

The CREWS 21.903 long term research ESPRIT project has proposed several strategies to support requirements elicitation through textual scenarios analysis. In the CREWS-L'Ecritoire approach, guidelines are proposed to systematise these strategies. To evaluate the effectiveness of the CREWS-L'Ecritoire requirements elicitation guidelines, an empirical study was undertaken. This paper presents an overview of the experiment results. These indicate that: (i) subjects apply the CREWS-L'Ecritoire guiding rules with different rates of efficiency, (ii) in average, all the guiding rules improve the subjects' ability to elicit correct requirements, and (iii) each of the guiding rule has a different rate of efficiency.

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Guiding the process of requirements elicitation through scenario analysis: Results of an empirical study

the CREWS 21.903 long term research ESPRIT project has proposed several strategies to support requirements elicitation through textual scenarios analysis. In the CREWS-L’Ecritoire approach, guidelines are proposed to systematise these strategies. However these guidelines have never been evaluated so far. To evaluate the effectiveness of the CREWS-L’Ecritoire requirements elicitation guidelines, an empirical study was undertaken : several subjects were asked to apply the CREWS requirements elicitation strategies with and without guidance. The results of this experiment indicate that : (i.) subjects apply the CREWS-L’Ecritoire guiding rules with different rates of efficiency, (ii.) in average, all the guiding rules improve the subjects’ ability to elicit correct requirements, and (iii.) each of the guiding rule has a different rate of efficiency. The paper presents the protocol used to conduct the experiment, and details the evaluation of these results for each of the three CREWS scenario based requirements elicitation strategies.

C. Ben Achour

Papers

A proposal for a scenario classification framework

Modelling and engineering the requirements engineering process: An overview of the NATURE approach

Scenario Use in European Software Organizations - Results from Site Visits and Questionnaires*

Guiding the process of requirements elicitation through scenario analysis: Results of an empirical study

Evaluating the CREWS-L'Ecritoire Requirements Elicitation Process