Intelligent assistance for managing conflicting software requirements /

The need to deal with conflicting system requirements has

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Tiao, Wen-Pin
Format: Thesis Book
Language:English
Published: [Place of publication not identified] : [publisher not identified] ; 1997.
Subjects:
Description
Summary:The need to deal with conflicting system requirements has
become increasingly important over the past few years since
many systems were specified, designed and built in a
conflict-rich environment. Conflict detection,
identification and resolution thus become an inevitable part
of a requirement analysis process. Customers often expressed
their preferences and needs in a natural language. These
requirements are elastic in that they can be satisfied to
some degree. Requirements can be viewed as goals that a
design tries to achieve. Design engineers must have a
profound understanding of the requirements and the
environments that the software will interact with in order to
design a software system. A given requirement usually can be
achieved by a set of design alternatives. To help the design
engineers in selecting a design alternative, we first need to
identify the impacts of the design alternatives on the
requirements. During a design process, making design
tradeoff decisions is prevalent. Prioritizing the design
alternatives could help the design engineers in making those
decisions. In this dissertation, we are interested in ways
that conflicts can be detected and resolutions can be
generated during the software process. In general, we shall
develop a systematic methodology that assists managing the
conflicting software requirements. In order to capture the
elasticity of software requirements, we shall rep- resent
requirements using fuzzy logic. We then build a formal
foundation to facilitate the identification of conflicting
requirements. Once the conflicting requirements are
identified, we shall develop a systematic approach for
analyzing the tradeoffs between conflicting requirements
the systematic tradeoff analyses will be used for three
important tasks in the requirement engineering process: (1)
for validating the structure used in aggregating prioritized
requirements, (2) for assisting the requirement engineers in
identifying the structures and the parameters of the
underlying representation of imprecise requirements and in
eliciting them from the customer, and (3) for assessing the
priorities of conflicting requirements. To guide the design
engineers in making design tradeoff decisions, we shall (1)
requirements, (2) reason about the implicit impacts of the
design alternatives on the requirements based on the
identified relationships, and (3) assist design engineers. in
selecting a set of design alternatives in order to satisfy
the requirements.
Item Description:Vita.
"Major Subject: Computer Science".
Physical Description:xii, 110 leaves : illustrations ; 28 cm.
Issued also on microfiche from University Microfilms Inc.
Bibliography:Includes bibliographical references: pages 101-109.