Goal-Based Behavioral Customization of Information Systems

Customizing software to perfectly fit individual needs is becoming increasingly important in information systems engineering. Users want to be able to customize software behavior through reference to terms familiar to their experience and needs. In this paper, we present a requirements-driven approach to behavioral customization of software. Goal models are constructed to represent alternative behaviors that users can exhibit to achieve their goals. Customization information is then added to restrict the space of possibilities to those that fit specific users, contexts or situations. Meanwhile, elements of the goal model are mapped to units of source code. This way, customization preferences posed at the requirements level are directly translated into system customizations. Our approach, which we apply to an on-line shopping cart system, does not assume adoption of a particular development methodology, platform or variability implementation technique and keeps the reasoning computation overhead from interfering with execution of the configured application.