AWERProcedia Information Technology & Computer Science 1 (2012) 276-281 2 nd World Conference on Information Technology (WCIT-2011) Decision making in goal oriented requirements engineering Arfan Mansoor a *, Detlef Streitferdt a , Ghulam Rasool b * a Ilmenau University of Technology,Software Architectures and ProductLines Group, Ilmenau, 98693, Germany b Comsats Institute of Information Technology, Department of Computer Science, Lahore, Pakistan Abstract In requirements engineering, we start with high level customer problems or needs and move towards a detailed specification of these problems. We need to make various decisions in the requirements engineering process and the wrong or poor decisions here will lead to failures of software products or to products poorly fulfilling their functionality. Accordingly, there is a need of a decision making activity at the early stages of software development i.e., at the requirements engineering stage which can aid the discovery of tradeoffs and to find alternatives. Decision making also needs an important consideration because it ranges from requirements elicitation to requirements negotiation and from requirements prioritization to requirements release planning. In this work emphasiseson our need of decision making in goal oriented requirements engineering. We analyzed whether decision making should be considered as an embedded activity into one of the stages of goal oriented requirements engineering or envisage this as a continuous activity which persists throughout the goal oriented life cycle. We made a distinction between the problem analysis phase and the decision making activity in the requirements engineering process and how it is helpful in requirements prioritization and in alternative system proposals. We also had a look at the individual levels of decision making and organizational level decision making steps and how they contribute to the requirements engineering decision making process. As a results decision making needs to be present in goal oriented requirements engineering, which turns out to be a vital requirement to the development of the decision models in goal oriented requirements engineering. Keywords: Requirements Engineering, Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering, Alternative System Proposal, Decision Making; Selection and peer review under responsibility of Prof. Dr. Hafize Keser. ©ϮϬϭϮ AĐadeŵiĐ Woƌld EduĐatioŶ & ‘eseaƌĐh CeŶteƌ. All ƌights ƌeseƌǀed. 1. Introduction System development is a creative activity where we move iteratively between problem space and solution space. It will be considered successful if the system meets its intended purpose and for this we need to have a *ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE: Arfan Mansor, Ailmenau University of Technology, Software Architectures and ProductLines Group, Ilmenau, 98693, Germany E-mail : arfan.mansoor@tu-ilmenau.de