Abstract

An increasing number of organisations are procuring off-the-shelf software products from commercial suppliers. However, there is a lack of methods and software tools for such requirements acquisition, product selection and product procurement. The authors propose a new method called PORE (Procurement-Oriented Requirements Engineering) which integrates existing requirements engineering techniques with those from knowledge engineering, feature analysis, multi-criteria decision-making and argumentation approaches. PORE is designed in part from conclusions drawn from real-world case studies of requirements acquisition for complex software product selection. One such study is reported in this paper. The paper ends with a discussion of ongoing development and evaluation of PORE. (Best Paper Award,1998, Most Influential Paper Award, 2008)