Using Goal Models Downstream: A Systematic Roadmap and Literature Review

Goal models have proven useful for capturing, understanding, and communicating requirements during early stages of software development. However, the utility of goal models is greatly enhanced when they can be exploited during downstream stages of the requirements analysis process (e.g. requirements elaboration, validation, planning), and can be used as part of the entire system life cycle (e.g., architectural and behavioral process design, coding, testing, monitoring, adaptation, and evolution). In order to better understand the progress that has been made in integrating goal models with downstream system development, the authors ask: what approaches exist that map/integrate/transform goal models to later stage software artifacts? To answer this question, they conduct a systematic survey, producing a roadmap of work summarizing 243 publications. Results include a categorization of the “why?” and “how?” for each approach. Furthermore, they select the 50 most prominent publications, based on citation numbers, in order to perform an in-depth literature review. Findings show that there is a wide variety of proposals with a variety of proposed goal models and targets, covering multiple paradigms, motivated by a variety of purposes. The authors conclude that although much work has been done in this area, the work is fragmented, following multiple separate strands of goal-orientation, and is often still in early stages of maturity.