Obstacle Analysis in Requirements Engineering: Retrospective and Emerging Challenges

With the growing adoption of AI-based systems, effective risk management is more important than ever. Obstacle analysis is a requirements engineering technique introduced three decades ago for designing dependable software systems despite failures, exceptions, and unforeseen behaviors in both the software and its environment. An obstacle is an undesirable situation that violates a stakeholder goal, an environment assumption, or a software requirement. Obstacles include safety hazards, security threats, user errors, and other adverse situations. Obstacle analysis provides a structured, systematic approach for identifying, analyzing, and resolving obstacles at the requirements level. In this retrospective paper, we summarize the original technique and discuss its impacts on research and practice. We also propose a research agenda to extend obstacle analysis to address emerging challenges in AI systems engineering.