Requirements Engineering: the KAOS approach
Description : Requirements engineering is an issue for many organisations. They realise that the success in their projects depend on a good requirements analysis. This rigorous analysis will offer to the contracting authority a better chance to avoid overruns, delays, and solutions that address the needs imperfectly.
This training course investigates a systematic way for performing requirements analyses and Iwriting requirements documents. This method -- KAOS -- advocates for the building of a model to represent the needs.
The training course provides also an overview of the Objectiver features that allow one to build KAOS requirements models and to build requirements documents based on those models. The method and the tool have been used for more than 10 years always successfully in various sectors (see the references section).
Targetted attendance: Business owners, IT managers, assistants to the contracting authority who have to realise requirements analyses, requirements documents, and IT plans.
Objectives:
- understand what is requirements engineering
- be able to read a KAOS model
- understand what the KAOS method consists of
- what it is possible to do with the Objectiver tool
Duration: 1 day
Where: on site
When: on request
Attendance: minimum 3 persons
Support: 1 electronic copy of the slides in PDF format

Contents:
- Introduction : positioning Requirements Engineering and overview on the methodology
- Assistant to the contracting authority role
- What is a requirement?
- What is a requirements analysis?
- Qualities of a good requirements analysis
- Requirements engineering versus requirements management
- Building a set of requirements with KAOS/Objectiver
- Roles played during a study; profile for the requirements engineer
- Requirements analysis with KAOS/Objectiver
- The global approach
- The models
- Goals
- What is a goal?
- Abstraction levels
- Functional and non functional goals
- Goals, requirements and expectations
- Goal refinement
- Conflicts between goals
- Obstacles
- Responsabilities and agents
- Objects
- What is an object?
- Attributes and relationships
- Agreggation an inheritance
- Operations
- What is an operation?
- Operationalising the requirements
- The Objectiver tool supporting the KAOS methodology
- Positioning the tool
- Main features
- Demonstration
The course contains various small examples allowing the trainees to understand the concepts. A concrete example borrowed from the expertise domain of the trainees can also be used during the course (to be proposed by the trainees and communicated to the trainer in advance).