Measuring Goal-Oriented Requirements Language Actor Stability

Abstract

Background: Goal models describe interests, preferences, intentions, desired goals and strategies of intervening stakeholders during the early requirements engineering stage. When capturing the requirements of real-world systems such as sociohyp technical systems, the produced goal models evolve quickly to become large and complex. Hence, gaining a sufficient level of understanding of such goal models, to perform maintenance tasks, becomes more challenging. Metrichyp based approaches have shown good potential in improving software designs and making them more understandable and easier to maintain. newline Aim: In this paper, we propose a novel metric to measure GRL (Goal-oriented Requirements Language) “actor stability” that provides a quantitative indicator of the actor maintainability. newline Method: We first, validate the proposed metric theoretically then empirically using a case study of a GRL model describing the fostering of the relationship between the university and its alumni. newline Results: The proposed actor stability metric is found to have significant negative correlation with the maintenance effort of GRL models. newline Conclusions: Our results show that the proposed metric is a good indicator of GRL actors' stability.

Keywords

• goal models
• goal-oriented requirements language (grl)
• stability
• metrics
• maintenance