The Computer Science Colloquium

John Mylopoulos
(University of Toronto/Trento)

"Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering"

    The last fifteen years have seen the rise of a new phase in software development which is concerned with the acquisition, modelling and analysis of stakeholder purposes ("goals") in order to derive functional and non-functional requirements. We review the history of ideas and research results for this new phase and sketch on-going research on the topic. Specifically, we discuss an agent-oriented software development methodology — called Tropos — that is founded on the concepts of goal, actor as well as inter-actor dependencies.

The research reported is the result of collaborations with colleagues at the Universities of Toronto and Trento.


*John Mylopoulos* earned a PhD degree from Princeton University in 1970 and has been professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto since that year. His research interests include conceptual modelling, requirements engineering, data semantics and knowledge management. Mylopoulos is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and the Royal Society of Canada (Academy of Sciences). He has served as programme/general chair of international conferences in Artificial Intelligence, Databases and Software Engineering, including IJCAI (1991), Requirements Engineering (1997), and VLDB (2004). He is currently serving as co-editor-in-chief of the Requirements Engineering Journal, published by Springer-Verlag.

Since September 2005 Mylopoulos is distinguished professor (chiara fama) of Science at the University of Trento.

The Colloquium is supported by generous contributions from the Bloomberg, Information Builders, Inc., and Netlogic, Inc.