Relationships among different modeling perspectives have been systematically investigated focusing either on given notations (e.g. OMT) or on domain reference models (e.g. SAP). In contrast, many successful informal methods for business analysis and requirements engineering (e.g. JAD) emphasize team negotiation, goal orientation and flexibility of modeling notations. This paper addresses the question how much formal and computerized support can be provided in such settings without destroying their creative tenor. Our solution comprises four components: (1) A modular conceptual modeling formalism organizes individual perspectives and their interrelationships. (2) Perspective schemata are linked to a conceptual meta meta model of shared domain terms, thus giving the architecture a semantic meaning and enabling adaptability and extensibility of the network of perspectives. (3) Inconsistency management across perspectives is handled in a goal-oriented manner, by defining the analysis goals as meta rules which are automatically adapted to perspective schemata. (4) Continuous incremental maintenance of inconsistency information is provided by exploiting recent view maintenance techniques from deductive databases. The approach has been fully implemented as an extension to the ConceptBase meta database management system and has been experimentally applied in the context of business analysis and data warehouse design.
['Hans W. Nissen', 'Matthias Jarke']
Requirements engineering repositories : Formal support for informal teamwork methods