Intentional Models based on Measurement Theory

Metrics and measures have always been the subject of quite a lot of research works in the Requirements Engineering (RE) community, including about intentional models of Goal-Oriented RE (GORE) such as those of i*. However, using recent developments of the Measurement Theory, in this paper we show that the concept of Measurement Framework (MF) for soft-systems is useful for the analysis of business service systems that need long-term service agreements based on consistent measurements at all stages of their life-cycle (from inception to operation). We show that with two kinds of goals and softgoals based on MF, it is possible to improve (a) the elicitation of functional and nonfunctional requirements, (b) the structure of the i* models, and (c) the consistency between run-time measurements and the model-based assessments of business services at early stages of RE.