Tracing business & user requirements in goal-driven SOA design using URN

Abstract

Several works incorporate goal models (GM) to enable analysis of IT business alignment, justifying design decisions and describing Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) to improve communication between stakeholders, for time and cost saving, as well as improving quality. Additional requirements lead to the problem of requirement traceability. Requirement traceability can significantly improve the project success, software quality and lower costs. On the other hand the creation and managing of requirement traceability links can be very time and cost consuming, especially if done manually. This work propose a method for automatically tracing requirements, described as goals, in a goal-driven SOA design (GDSD) approach to its service design. Our approach is based on the industry standard URN, existing business process modelling and service design techniques. We introduce automatable steps to create traceability links during the design phase. Those links can be used later to retrieve the connections between GM and services, as well as the creation of a service GM for the designed services. We show that our approach works for the WS-I case study. In addition we provide a prototypical implementation for a GDSD tool that completely automatizes the traceability link creation and the service GM creation. The tool enables requirement traceability without extra effort during the design phase. Systematically steps to create traceability links allow automation of the creation of traceability links. This leads to fewer errors, as well as time and cost savings. This is a major advantage over existing approaches which usually use manual traceability methods to connect services to GM. Our method can be used in existing SOA frameworks in the design phase.