VIEWPOINTS - PRINCIPLES, PROBLEMS AND A PRACTICAL APPROACH TO REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING

The paper includes a survey and discussion of viewpoint-oriented appro aches to requirements engineering and a presentation of new work in th is area which has been designed with practical application in mind. We describe the benefits of viewpoint-oriented requirements engineering and describe the strengths and weaknesses of a number of viewpoint-ori ented methods. We discuss the practical problems of introducing viewpo int-oriented requirements engineering into industrial software enginee ring practice and why these have prevented the widespread use of exist ing approaches. We then introduce a new model of viewpoints called Pre view. Preview viewpoints are flexible, generic entities which can be u sed in different ways and in different application domains. We describ e the novel characteristics of the Preview viewpoints model and the as sociated processes of requirements discovery, analysis and negotiation . Finally we discuss how well this approach addresses some outstanding problems in requirements engineering (RE) and the practical industria l problems of introducing new requirements engineering methods.