Using task-oriented requirements engineering in different domains - experiences with application in research and industry

Early orientation towards tasks of the application domain to be supported by a software system has been proposed as a fruitful means for achieving more appropriate and usable systems as well as for focusing the requirements engineering process. Besides goal orientation, task orientation has therefore been recognized as a promising concept for assuring more completeness and correctness of requirements specifications, and better integration with usability engineering issues. In this paper, we present experiences made with the task-oriented requirements engineering framework "TORE" in four different case studies. These case studies were selected based on their contextual specifics, like service orientation or ambient intelligence ,that might impose certain challenges on task-oriented RE. As a lesson learned, we experienced TORE to be highly beneficial even in systems that do not seem to be "traditional" information systems at first glance. However, we also identified limitations that call for necessary adaptations.