Regulation, the Invisible Part of the Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering Iceberg

Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) is considered to be one of the main achievements that the requirements of the Requirements Engineering field has produced since its inception. Several GORE methods were designed in the last twenty years in both research and industry. Curiously, GORE methods seem to have emerged out of nowhere in the early 1990s, the concept of Goal appearing as a natural element in explaining human and organizational behaviour. We have found no theoretical or philosophical work that explicitly link GORE to an underlying organizational model. In this paper, we show that most GORE methods are implicitly based on the goal-seeking, decision making organizational model. We argue that there are other organizational models that may better explain human behaviour, albeit at the expense of more complex models. We present one such alternative model that explains individual and organizational survival through continuous regulation. We give our point of view of the changes needed in GORE methods to support this alternative view through the use of maintenance goals and beliefs.