CaRE: A refinement calculus for requirements engineering based on argumentation semantics

Elrakaiby Y., Ferrari A., Mylopoulos J.

Argumentation  cognition  electronic mail  Tools  Requirements elicitation  Structured argumentation  stakeholders  semantics  Requirements negotiation  calculus  Requirements  Traceability  standards  Dung abstract framework  Formal argumentation  Requirements analysis  Goal models  requirements engineering  Requirements refinements  Requirements engineering 

The requirements problem consists of transforming stakeholder requirements - however informal, ambiguous, conflicting, unattainable, imprecise and incomplete - into a consistent, complete and realizable specification through a systematic process. We propose a refinement calculus for requirements engineering (CaRE) for solving this problem, which takes into account the typically dialectic nature of requirements activities. The calculus casts the requirement problem as an iterative argument between stakeholders and requirements engineers, where posited requirements are attacked for being ambiguous, incomplete, etc. and refined into new requirements that address the defect pointed out by the attack. Refinements are carried out by operators provided by CaRE that refine (e.g., strengthen, weaken, decompose) existing requirements, to build a refinement graph. The semantics of the operators is provided by means of argumentation theory. Examples are given to illustrate the elements of our proposal.

Source: Requirements Engineering Conference, pp. 364–369, 20/08/2018

Publisher: IEEE, New York, USA

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