Measure Software Requirement Specifications by Ontology Reasoning

Requirements Engineering (RE) is essential to a software project. As the result of RE process, software Requirement Specifications (SRS) should be consistent, correct and complete. However, the acquisition, specification and evolution of requirements from different stakeholders or sources usually leads to incomplete, ambiguous, and faulty requirements. This may become an incalculable risk for the whole project and a disaster for the final software product. In this paper we present a method to improve the quality of a SRS semi-automatically. Facilitated by ontology reasoning techniques, we describe how to detect and repair faulty information in the SRS. Furthermore, we also provide various metrics to measure the quality of the SRS at any time during the RE process. Finally, we generalize our approach to be applicable for any information captured in an ontology.

[1]  Alan M. Davis,et al.  Software requirements - analysis and specification , 1990 .

[2]  Mark S. Fox,et al.  A Requirement Ontology for Engineering Design , 1996 .

[3]  Philippe Massonet,et al.  GRAIL/KAOS: An Environment for Goal-Driven Requirements Engineering , 1997, Proceedings of the (19th) International Conference on Software Engineering.

[4]  Axel van Lamsweerde,et al.  Managing Conflicts in Goal-Driven Requirements Engineering , 1998, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[5]  Didar Zowghi,et al.  The Three Cs of Requirements : Consistency , Completeness , and Correctness , 2002 .

[6]  Austen Rainer,et al.  Requirements problems in twelve software companies: an empirical analysis , 2002, IEE Proc. Softw..

[7]  Donald Firesmith,et al.  Specifying Good Requirements , 2003, J. Object Technol..

[8]  Robin A. Gandhi,et al.  Ontology-based active requirements engineering framework , 2005, 12th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC'05).

[9]  Carlos Juiz,et al.  An approach to ontology-aided performance engineering through NFR framework , 2007, WOSP '07.

[10]  M. Odeh,et al.  Ontology-driven Requirements Engineering: Building the OntoREM Meta Model , 2008, 2008 3rd International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies: From Theory to Applications.

[11]  Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite,et al.  On Non-Functional Requirements in Software Engineering , 2009, Conceptual Modeling: Foundations and Applications.

[12]  Axel van Lamsweerde,et al.  Reasoning About Alternative Requirements Options , 2009, Conceptual Modeling: Foundations and Applications.

[13]  Jeff Z. Pan,et al.  Closed world reasoning for OWL2 with NBox , 2010 .

[14]  Jeff Z. Pan,et al.  Towards Ontology-driven Requirements Engineering , 2011 .