Requirements Capture Workflow in Global Information Systems

Abstract

The development of information systems has changed a lot in the last years. Nowadays, applications are often developed in distributed environment. It is quite common, they are distributed via Internet and they usually have hypermedia and multimedia elements in huge databases. They are characterized by having complex functional and security requirements, many and undefined users who have different degree of knowledge. These systems are named Global Information Systems. The development of these complex global information systems must be like a software project, based on a development methodology, to get the application suitable to the client’s requirements. This methodology must offer a right treatment of all its aspects. Nowadays, there is no standard methodology which covers all these characteristics. On the one hand, there are some traditional propositions, like the Unified Process [11]. This is a good proposition to work with storage and functional requirements. On the other hand, there are propositions that have come from the multimedia environment, like OOHDM [18], Hyper-UML [14], WSDM [4], etc. which, although give more importance to the interface and navigation, don’t cover all the phases of the whole life cycle. After doing a comparative study of the most relevant methodologies for hypermedia and Web development published in the last few years [7], we have made a methodology proposition to develop global information systems. This methodology is based on the Unified Process, but it adds new models and aspects to treat correctly the navigation, the hypermedia and the interface. In this paper, we present a global vision of our methodology and we focus on the proposition to get requirements from the user. To present the results, we apply the proposition to a real problem in a public company in Seville.