This book discusses enterprise hierarchies, which view a target system
with varying degrees of abstraction. These requirement refinement
hierarchies can be represented by goal models. It is important to verify
that such hierarchies capture the same set of rationales and intentions
and are in mutual agreement with the requirements of the system being
designed. The book also explores how hierarchies manifest themselves in
the real world by undertaking a data mining exercise and observing the
interactions within an enterprise. The inherent sequence-agnostic
property of goal models prevents requirement analysts from performing
compliance checks in this phase as compliance rules are generally
embedded with temporal information. The studies discussed here seek to
extract finite state models corresponding to goal models with the help
of model transformation. The i*ToNuSMV tool implements one such
algorithm to perform model checking on i* models. In turn, the AFSR
framework provides a new goal model nomenclature that associates
semantics with individual goals. It also provides a reconciliation
machinery that detects entailment or consistency conflicts within goal
models and suggests corrective measures to resolve such conflicts. The
authors also discuss how the goal maintenance problem can be mapped to
the state-space search problem, and how A* search can be used to
identify an optimal goal model configuration that is free from all
conflicts. In conclusion, the authors discuss how the proposed research
frameworks can be extended and applied in new research directions. The
GRL2APK framework presents an initiative to develop mobile applications
from goal models using reusable code component repositories.
