From object-oriented to goal-oriented requirements analysis

Abstract

The article focuses on the object-oriented and goal-oriented requirements analysis. The growing influence of object-oriented programming on programming practice has led to the rise of a new paradigm for system and software requirements analysis, popularly known as object-oriented analysis (OOA). This paradigm adopts ideas from object-oriented programming and blends them with ideas from semantic data modeling and knowledge representation into modeling framework that is more powerful than traditional techniques such as data flow diagrams, structured analysis and the like. The Object-Oriented Systems Analysis technique adopts the Entity-Relationship model to capture the declarative aspects of a software system. OOA is popular because it significantly advances the state of practice in requirements modeling. OOA techniques offer a coherent framework which integrates a comprehensive set of modeling concepts for capturing declarative, behavioral and interactive aspects of a system. In addition, OOA techniques strongly support two structuring mechanisms, generalization and aggregation, in terms of which a modeler can organize and manage the immense amount of information captured by her models.