A Set of Heuristics to Support Early Identification of Conflicting Requirements

Abstract

Conventional approaches to system design use requirements as boundary conditions against which the design activity occurs. Decisions at a given level of the architecture decomposition can result in the flowing down of conflicting requirements, which are easy to fulfill in isolation but extremely difficult when dealt with simultaneously. Designing against such sets of requirements considerably limits system affordability. Identification of such conflicts is usually performed in industry by subject matter experts. Such evaluations are primarily driven by experience. As a result, effectiveness in identifying conflicting requirements is strongly dependent on the person making the assessment. We propose in this paper a set of heuristics that supports identification of conflicting requirements by providing direction and focus in the identification effort. The heuristics have been derived from a combination of literature review and experience from practitioners. In particular, a set of practitioners was interviewed orally and through a questionnaire in order to abstract and generalize their individual experiences.

A Research on Measuring and Reducing Problem Complexity to Increase System Affordability: From Theory to Practice

“…The matrix is formed by combining the proposed categorization method in [46] and the set of heuristics defined in [44]. Examples of elemental attributes for laws of physics could include temperature, power dissipation, velocity, or mass.…”

“…The content of this section have been extracted from [42][43][44]. Results from the theoretical developments led into defining the concept of problem complexity, as the difficulty to solve a given problem, e.g., to design a system given a set of requirements.…”

Identifying conflicting domains in problem frame diagram for problem-oriented requirements analysis

“…[6] provide a method called the Finer Semantic Analysis-based Requirements Conflict Detector (FSARC) that uses finer semantic composition analysis to automatically identify conflicts between the provided natural language functional requirements. The Alejandro Salado and Roshanak Nilchiani [7] have a set of heuristics that aids in figuring out of conflicting requirements by offering direction and emphasis in the identification process. The heuristics were developed by combining practitioner experience and a survey of the literature.…”