Analysing requirements using ODP

Abstract

This paper describes an ODP-Based approach for the classification of requirements for projects devoted to enterprise systems. The real problem to be faced is not the number of requirements, as they are very often scarce and imprecise, but the fact that the requirements a system designer can get are normally sparse, i.e., they belong to extremely different categories. Many design methodologies try to define a process for analysing requirements, but only seldom is a methodology able to keep track in a proper way of all requirements, show whether and how a particular requirement is satisfied by the proposed solution, show which system's components satisfy which requirements, show how new requirements can fit in a pretty advanced design, and how these new requirements are related to others. This paper claims that a coherent classification schema of these requirements, such as that provided by the ODP Reference Model, can give interesting answers to the problems above. The ODP Reference Model does not claim to define a methodology, not even for a requirement's analysis: yet, a requirement's analysis performed using ODP concepts and terms has shown promising results in a real project that is described in this paper. The analysis is not complete, as the project still is running: yet, it is believed that the results that have been attained already show the usefulness of the approach.