| This thesis proposes a framework for software customization founded on goal analysis. Goals are used to represent and analyse user needs. The elementary result of the analysis is a goal model consisting of qualitative relationships among goals. The thesis first establishes that the structure of goal models defines a space of alternative customizations, each representing a particular way for fulfilling top-level goals. Then we consider user skills and preferences as descriptions of user variability. We adopt a metric-based dependency between these two variables and the alternatives, in a way that each valuation of the former (a particular user) implies a suitability value for each of the latter. We examine how each alternative may relate to a software design and consequently to a variant of the "end-product". We support these ideas with examples from a case study that conserns an integrated communication system for people with cognitive, sensory or motor impairments. |
