Capturing and Aligning Assurance Requirements for Business Services Systems

In this chapter we introduce and illustrate a systematic and rigorous approach for the elicitation and the modelling of assurance requirements inherent to business services offered by a service system. The approach is based on guidelines provided by the ISO 15504 norm, which is applicable for the assessment of any type of process in order to check its compliance against assurance requirements. We explain how 15504 can be applied in the context of business services with the support provided by goal-oriented requirements engineering techniques like i*. Its use is illustrated through the handling of an excerpt of a real case from the construction sector complemented with expertise developed in IT service level management. While this chapter is focusing on the capture of business requirements and their transformation into a business oriented solution, we also briefly explain how this business view is part of a more complete methodology also encompassing the service value and the service software views associated with a service system.