Managing requirements inconsistency with development goal monitors

Abstract

Managing software requirements during their development can be a complex and difficult task. The requirements can be voluminous, complex, and changing. The analysts, who develop the requirements, can be numerous and changing. Determining the current state of requirements in such a dynamic development environment is challenging. We present techniques to manage requirements in such a dynamic environment.We define requirements management techniques which uncover, manage, and restructure requirements inconsistencies. Aspects of these techniques have been automated within a multi-user World Wide Web environment, called DEALSCRIBE. The techniques, and their support within DEALSCRIBE, are methodology neutral; they simply assume that requirements development is composed of discrete events and products which can be monitored. Requirements development is then managed by specifying development goals, monitoring for their failure, and applying corrective actions when the goals are not met.To support requirements inconsistency management, we have defined requirements consistency goals which are monitored using our requirements management techniques. To validate the utility of the approach, we have applied the basic techniques in several case studies. Additionally, we have conducted a new case study using the support of DEALSCRIBE. We draw qualitative conclusions from these case studies that: 1) the general approach of managing requirements development through monitoring development goals helps an analyst gain a clearer understand of the requirements state and helps to focus development; and 2) the techniques specific to uncovering, controlling, and restructuring requirements inconsistencies can reduce an analyst's effort.Index Terms-Requirements engineering, inconsistency and conflict management, process modeling and monitoring, meta-modeling, requirements tools.

Information System Flexibility and the Cost Efficiency of Business Processes

“…Research in systems requirement engineering, however, has long pointed out that nonsystematic and unstructured analyses of IS requirements can lead to suboptimal results (Robinson and Pawlowski, 1999).…”

Promoting traits into model-driven development

“…Merging state machines can be used to identify, track, and resolve inconsistencies [37,46,59,87]. State machines are also used to build a full representation of the behaviour of the system under development.…”

Specifying Monitoring and Switching Problems in Context

“…In addition, linear temporal logic may be used to express these parameters and to show their interdependency. Robinson [26] has also recognised the need to monitor application software and to assess their continual satisfaction of higher level goals. The primary objective of Robinson's approach is to detect inconsistency in goals resulting from changes in the operating environment, and to take corrective measures to restore them.…”

“…The primary difference between the related work above [24][25][26] and ours is that we monitor problem variations in addition to requirements. This requires us to explicitly represent the core requirements R, the problem contexts, the specifications and the relevant concerns that might not be apparent in considering the requirements alone.…”