Requirements Analysis in Tropos: a self referencing example

Tropos, a novel agent-oriented software engineering methodology, is characterized by three key points: (i) it pays much attention to the activities that precede the specification of the prescriptive requirements, such as understanding how the intended system would meet the organizational goals; (ii) it uses the same mentalistic notions of actors, goals, plans, and actors intentional dependencies, along all the phases of requirement analysis and system design; (iii) it foresees a process of requirement and system modeling that is incremental and iterative, based on a set of progressive transformational steps. As a result, Tropos offers a much more homogeneous approach for the different development phases than most other approaches, also providing for a powerful support for the intentional analysis of actor requirements and their correspondence with the adopted solutions and for a consistent use of traceability. The present paper will take into account the application of the Tropos methodology to a self-motivating case study: the definition of a support tool for the Tropos methodology itself. Unlike in previous papers, here the attention will be concentrated on the early requirements and on how to manage the transition from this to the late requirement analysis. In other terms, the focus will mainly be on point (i), among those listed above, and on the high level characteristics of the iterative transformational process mentioned at point (iii), also as applied to the transition from early requirements to late requirements.