Software Requirements Inconsistency Research On Multi-Valued Logic Based State Machine

With the development of software engineering, the development of software systems nowadays is a complex and lengthy activity that involves the participation and collaboration of many stakeholders. This results in many partial models of the developing system. These models can be inconsistent with each other since they describe the system from different perspectives and reflect the views of the stakeholders involved in their construction. Although inconsistency has negative effects in the software development, the potential problem inconsistency revealed may improve requirement analysis process and lead to better requirement inconsistency analysis result. One the other hand, the modern distributed requirements elicitation also makes inconsistency a common phenomenon in the software development. Therefore, the research on the requirements inconsistency is very important.This paper introduced the recent inconsistency handling methods and discussed the problems of these methods as well as the causes of the problems. A new inconsistency analysis method is presented based on such discussion. In the new method, state machine and multi-valued logics is collaborated to resolve requirements inconsistency. There are two parts, requirements description and inconsistency resolving method, in the method. The requirements description is of two sets, state set and event set, and defined as a state machine to reserve global context information. The inconsistency resolving method is realized by multi-valued logic operation to improve flexibility and commonality. In the last, an auxiliary tool of requirements analysis, SRIA, based on this method is introduced to prove the feasibility of our method.Software requirements are essentially subjective desires. The stakeholders'opinion is so important to the requirements analysis that the complicated fully automation of inconsistency handling is mostly not desirable in common practical work. In this method, the stakeholders'intention is implemented by applying specific multi-valued logic operation and the quality of inconsistency handling is improved by continuously evaluation.