A Requirements Conflict Management Research Based On Requirements Patrition

Requirements engineering is the first stage of the software engineering process, andstudies have shown that there are many factors which lead to failure of software developmentcome from the requirements engineering phase. If there exists incomplete or inconsistentrequirements, this situation will have a strong impact on all the work in subsequent stages, andlead to the consequences that the final software product inconsistent with expectations.For a long time, there have been scholars researching and improving the work inrequirements engineering process, including formal representation for requirements, therequirements traceability increase and the requirements verification support, in order to gethigh-quality requirements specification. IEEE830-1998standard defines that one of thecharacteristics that the high-quality should own is the requirements consistency. And theresearch about the requirements conflict management have never stopped.Based on the goal-driven requirements modeling approach, this paper divides the systemrequirement into three partitions, including objective, constraint and requirement, andestablishes relationship between the specific function with the upper objective and constraint,focus on the influences that the objective and constraint bring when acquiring requirements andregards the objective and constraint as standard when managing the requirements conflict. Thework of this paper can be summarized as the following several aspects:First, abstract the system objective, constraint and requirement based on the goal-drivenrequirements modeling approach, establish the objective-requirement matrix and constraint-requirement matrix to represent the internal requirement relation and the correlation betweenthe requirement with the upper objectives and constraints. Define standard FROs and FRsObased on the objective-requirement matrix, define standard FRCs and FRsC based onconstraint-requirement matrix to measure the degree of association between the requirementsand the system objective and constraint.Second, after have identified the requirements conflict, define the "five-criteriarequirement decision-making method" based on standards FROs, FRsO, FRCs, FRsC and therequirements weight, and calculate the requirement consistency degree with system of eachrequirement.Third, according to the results calculated in the previous step, compare the requirement consistency degree with system of the conflict requirements, abandon the requirements with alower consistency degree, finally update the three requirements tracking matrix.At the end of this paper, we will combine a specific example to verify the reliability andvalidity of the method. Using the "five-criteria requirement decision-making method" proposedin this paper to manage the requirements conflict appeared in "Noise Source Location System".In addition, a support tool named Tool-ReqDesicion for this method is completed, whichachieved the automated requirements decision.