Requirements Engineering Techniques for e-Services

E-services are deeds, processes and performances that are exchanged commercially and provisioned via the Internet. Such e-services rely on web-service technology as an implementation platform. One of the key problems in developing innovative e-services is to create a shared understanding of the e-service at hand, and to analyze whether the e-service is commercially viable and technically feasible. Complicating factors are that, because of innovativeness of the service at hand, the service is at most vaguely articulated at first, and that many different stakeholders representing different enterprises and different interests are involved, thus creating misunderstanding and confusion. In contrast to normal service development, an e-service is highly Information Technology (IT)-intensive by definition, so an e-service from a commercial point of view should be properly aligned with its webservice enabled implementation. In this chapter, we present an approach, based on requirements engineering techniques, to first understand and analyze the e-service, and second to develop a blue-print for a web-service based implementation. We take a multiperspective approach that includes a commercial value perspective, a process perspective, and an information systems perspective. This chapter is based on two earlier conference papers [17, 26].