PREview

PREview (Process and Requirements Viewpoints) is a requirements method which focuses on the early stage of Requirements Engineering: discovering and documenting requirements. PREview uses a Viewpoint-Oriented Approach to enable the conversion of top-level goals (“concerns”) into requirements and constraints. “Preview aims to improve the quality of requirements specification by providing a framework which can support both requirements elicitation and the structuring of the requirements document.”

PREview focuses on viewpoints for requirements engineering of computer-based systems but the viewpoint-concept is also used in various other areas of expertise. In communications, the ODP (Open Distributed Processing) Reference Model defines viewpoints from which a system can be specified. In CSCW viewpoints are also used to structure organisational analyses. However, these have not adapted the explicit notion of a viewpoint, but use it as a general multiple perspective approach to analysis.

The CORE method developed by Mullery was the first method to use viewpoints as an explicit notion. Nuseibeh and Greenspan have developed similar methods, in which viewpoints are a central notion.

PREview is a pragmatic adaptation of these older methods. The traditional viewpoint-oriented approaches are quite inflexible, which makes it hard to introduce these methods into existing businesses. PREview is not prescriptive about the methods and notations to be used, thereby making it easier to be integrated into existing requirements methods.

PREview aims to improve the quality of requirements specification by providing a framework for the early phases of the requirements process.

Using meta-modelling, the PREview process will be explained in the coming paragraphs.

Figure 1 shows the activities within the PREview process. For clarity, the definition of these activities will not be shown in a table, as is common in meta-modelling, but will be explained in the chapter #The PREview process.

These activities have several concepts, or deliverables, which can be found in the meta-data table below. These concepts are linked to the Process-diagram above, creating the process-data diagram. Some of the concepts in the table have a definition unique to the PREview method, and will be defined using as source. More generic concepts are defined using more standardized definitions.

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