REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING FOR THE BUSINESS PROCESS RE-ENGINEERING: an Example in the Agro-Food Supply Chain

Abstract

Being able to reduce the gap between Requirements Engineering and Software Engineering is crucial to foster the developments of better Informations Systems that more precisely adresses the organizational needs of the stakeholders. One of the key factor toward this objective is adopting methodologies in which the the conceptual level of Requirements Engineering techniques is raised, so that formal representations can be used since the very early stages of requirements elicitation and analysis. The Tropos methodology targets this objective by means of the so called Early Requirements Analysis, that is aimed at understanding and analyzing the organizational goals by means of a precise and very expressive diagrammatic notation. The paper exemplifies the use of Tropos Early Requirements while applied to a simplified case of business analysis in the context of the terminal part of the agro-food products delivery chain. The case is extracted from a more comprehensive analysis performed in the context of an ongoing project in the field of the dissemination of knowledge concerning the topic of the "Genetically Modified Organisms" (GMO).