Agile Requirements Evolution via Paraconsistent Reasoning

Innovative companies need an agile approach for the engineering of their product requirements, to rapidly respond to and exploit changing conditions. The agile approach to requirements must nonetheless be systematic, especially with respect to accommodating legal and nonfunctional requirements. This paper examines how to support a combination of lightweight, agile requirements which can still be systematically modeled, analyzed and changed. We propose a framework, RE-KOMBINE, which is based on a propositional language for requirements modeling called Techne. We define operations on Techne models which tolerate the presence of inconsistencies in the requirements. This paraconsistent reasoning is vital for supporting delayed commitment to particular design solutions. We evaluate these operations with an industry case study using two well-known formal analysis tools. Our evaluations show that the proposed framework scales to industry-sized requirements models, while still retaining (via propositional logic) the informality that is so useful during early requirements analysis.

[1]  Richard Baskerville,et al.  Agile requirements engineering practices and challenges: an empirical study , 2007, Inf. Syst. J..

[2]  N. Rescher,et al.  On inference from inconsistent premisses , 1970 .

[3]  Stephen Fickas,et al.  Goal-Directed Requirements Acquisition , 1993, Sci. Comput. Program..

[4]  John Mylopoulos,et al.  Representing and Using Nonfunctional Requirements: A Process-Oriented Approach , 1992, IEEE Trans. Software Eng..

[5]  Didar Zowghi,et al.  On the interplay between consistency, completeness, and correctness in requirements evolution , 2003, Inf. Softw. Technol..

[6]  Harold W. Thimbleby,et al.  Delaying Commitment , 1988, IEEE Softw..

[7]  Stefano Spaccapietra,et al.  Journal on Data Semantics I , 2003, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[8]  Ramon O'Callaghan.  Fixing the payment system at Alvalade XXI: a case on IT project risk management , 2007, J. Inf. Technol..

[9]  Bashar Nuseibeh,et al.  Managing inconsistencies in an evolving specification , 1995, Proceedings of 1995 IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE'95).

[10]  Michael Jackson,et al.  Four dark corners of requirements engineering , 1997, TSEM.

[11]  John Mylopoulos,et al.  Simple and Minimum-Cost Satisfiability for Goal Models , 2004, CAiSE.

[12]  A. van Lamsweerde.  Goal-oriented requirements enginering: a roundtrip from research to practice [enginering read engineering] , 2004 .

[13]  Bashar Nuseibeh,et al.  Making inconsistency respectable in software development , 2001, J. Syst. Softw..

[14]  Aditya K. Ghose,et al.  Formal tools for managing inconsistency and change in RE , 2000, Tenth International Workshop on Software Specification and Design. IWSSD-10 2000.

[15]  William N. Robinson,et al.  Requirements interaction management , 2003, CSUR.

[16]  Des Greer,et al.  Software requirements change taxonomy: Evaluation by case study , 2011, 2011 IEEE 19th International Requirements Engineering Conference.

[17]  Neil A. Ernst,et al.  Techne: Towards a New Generation of Requirements Modeling Languages with Goals, Preferences, and Inconsistency Handling , 2010, 2010 18th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference.

[18]  Matthias Jarke,et al.  The Brave New World of Design Requirements: Four Key Principles , 2010, CAiSE.

[19]  Ray Offen,et al.  A logical framework for modeling and reasoning about the evolution of requirements , 1997, Proceedings of ISRE '97: 3rd IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering.

[20]  J. M. Singer,et al.  IEEE Recommended Practice for Software Requirements SpeciÞcations , 1993 .

[21]  J. Dekleer.  An assumption-based TMS , 1986 .

[22]  Johan de Kleer,et al.  An Assumption-Based TMS , 1987, Artif. Intell..

[23]  Neil A. Ernst,et al.  Finding incremental solutions for evolving requirements , 2011, 2011 IEEE 19th International Requirements Engineering Conference.

[24]  John Mylopoulos,et al.  Formal Reasoning Techniques for Goal Models , 2003, J. Data Semant..

[25]  Lindsay Groves,et al.  Software Evolution with Refinement and Retrenchment , 2003 .

[26]  Bashar Nuseibeh,et al.  Managing inconsistent specifications: reasoning, analysis, and action , 1998, TSEM.