Generalizing and composing goals and objects in a scenario together for requirements analysis

To introduce information systems into our daily activities, we have to know actual goals of the people in each activity. However, requirements analysts cannot directly know such goals. They can directly observe or know the way of tasks in the activity, i.e. scenario. In this paper, we proposed a requirements elicitation method using a scenario and goals. In the method, the analysts first identify superficial goals from the scenario on the basis of objects in the scenario. The analysts then generalize and/or combine the superficial goals into the fundamental goals of the people. Such fundamental goals are then decomposed into other superficial goals according to the abilities of new available technologies. We applied the method to an example to confirm how it worked.