Eliciting Goals and Softgoals - How to Perceive the Intentionality at the Beginning of the Journey

Software requirements activity, in the organizational context, is about addressing the business information problem; discover the needs for improving the situation and consequently specify the software requirements. Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE), aims to better understand the information problem by looking at organizational actors’ intentionality (goals and softgoals) first. Eliciting goals and softgoals within an organizational context is a difficult task: since, among other things, it demands skills and time. This paper describes one strategy for eliciting goals and softgoals that still relies on software engineers’ skills and time, but it simplifies the process. We propose the use of a software tool to support a systematic process to mitigate the chances for goals to be missed regardless of the experience and skills of the software engineers involved in the project.