URN: Towards a New Standard for the Visual Description of Requirements

摘要

In November 1999, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T, SG 17) initiated a question on the standardization of a User Requirements Notation (URN) for complex reactive, distributed, and dynamic systems and applications. URN is intended to be standardized by September 2003. This paper presents the motivations behind URN, its objectives, and the current proposal that combines two complementary languages. The first one, GRL (Goaloriented Requirement Language), is used to describe business goals, nonfunctional requirements, alternatives, and rationales. The second one, UCM (Use Case Maps), enables the description of functional requirements as causal scenarios. The introduction of URN is likely to impact the development ans use of other SG 17 languages (especially MSC and SDL) as well as OMG's UML. This paper briefly explores several relations between these languages as well as potential for synergy and coordination.