B Requirements
The purpose of this Appendix is to provide the reader with relevant pointers and
introductory material to the IoT-A Unified Requirement list, also called UNIs
(see [IOT-A UNIs]).
Unified Requirements in IoT-A are mainly targeted at supporting and validating
the work on the ARM and typically served as input for developing the views,
perspectives and the functional decomposition shown in this document (see
Section 4.2.2), as well as supporting Guidelines development.
The collection of unified requirements relied on:
- The rich experience and knowledge of the project partners guided the
derivation of a minimum-requirement list, which also had a major
influence in drafting the IoT Reference Model. The state of the art
concerning thing-centric communication and Internet technologies was
considered, and a list of internal requirements was inferred. The state of
the art was collected in Deliverable D1.1 [Consorzio 2011]; - A group of external IoT stakeholders was established and queried for
their use cases and their expectations toward IoT. They were also asked
for their objectives, concerns, and business goals. As far as feasible,
these overarching aspirations were broken down into requirements.
Usually, such stakeholder aspirations are not made as system requirements,
rather as use-case specific goals. Therefore, each stakeholder aspiration was
thoroughly analysed, and suitable translations into requirements were sought.
Stakeholder aspirations can be rather general (strategic objectives, concerns, or
business goals) or they can be very specific, i.e., a stakeholder spells out what
kind of functionality or performance she/he needs.
While requirement work within the project tries to follow requirement best
practices (by e.g. using an adapted Volere methodology [Volere 2013], by
using input from both potential end-users and developers), producing and
exploiting requirements on a Reference Architecture (and Model) level is
somewhat different than for a concrete system (for which the state of the art
methodology is largely targeted). This induces a number of specificities both in
the nature and the process through which these unified requirements were
obtained. All these are documented in deliverable D6.3 along with the complete
list of Unified Requirements [IoT-A UNIs].
A living/up-to-date list of Unified Requirements is also available at
http://www.iot-a.eu/public/requirements [IoT-A UNIs], for consultation within
a web browser and enhanced with dynamic filtering abilities.