Effect-oriented requirements elicitation and specification

To support the early evaluation of the effects of a novel system on its environment, it is important to understand and analyze current deficits and problems within the application domain and to derive hypotheses on the potential impact of the system. An emerging application domain of such cause-effect oriented requirements engineering methods is the automotive domain. New upcoming functionalities in automobiles and traffic systems do not only require accurate development and consideration of safety-related aspects, but are also more and more constrained to proving their positive effect on existing traffic systems, ecological and sociological aspects, as well as, e.g., future reduction of the number of traffic deaths. Based on a systematic elicitation and refinement of system requirements, explicit measures can be derived to evaluate the achievement and coverage of envisioned system goals and to identify further optimization goals. In this paper, we will introduce a requirements engineering method and specification guideline that supports the deductive derivation and specification of measures from a causal chain of goals, deficits, hypotheses and solutions for evaluating a system's effect on its application environment. We already applied this approach in a research project in the automotive domain and will exemplarily describe the realization of a concrete vehicle function that interacts with the environment. At the end, we will provide a general conclusion regarding our first experiences with the described method and with the specification guideline.