A Problem-Oriented Approach To Requirements Traceability And Its Technical Support

With the continuous progress and development of computer application technologies, computer software systems that we use are becoming increasingly complex, their scales are increasingly large, and the costs of software development are increasing continually, which leads to the rise of risks in software development. Software has not only become a basic information infrastructure, but also contains intensive features. On the one hand, it becomes the indispensable part of people’s life, such as electronic government, electronic commerce and software of mobile phones. On the other hand, greater demands have been placed on the quality of software in some highly sophisticated technology areas, such as aerospace, national defense and military, etc. However, the present situation of the software development as well as its quality can hardly meet people’s expectations, for example, many software products cannot be completed on time and within budget, and the software quality is inferior. Software failure caused by the inferior quality often brings much inconvenience to people’s work and their lives, and even causes tremendous economic losses, property damages and losses of human-life. Although there are many reasons for the above problems, software requirements problem can be one of the most important reasons. Many researchers find that software requirements are often the core causes that lead to software development projects to fail. Therefore, studying the requirements engineering technique has importantly theoretical and practical significance.Problem Frames are one of the main methods of requirements engineering, which has attracted wide attention and research in the requirements engineering field. As the core of problem-oriented requirements analysis approach, in the problem frames approach, software specification is defined to be the behavior of the computer machine in the context its application domains, whereas requirements are defined to be environment behaviors desired by customers in the real world. Thus, a software development problem is to provide a correct software specifications, which can meet the requirements that customers propose in the given context. One core concept of the problem frames approach is that the machine domain will interact with the problem domain to meet the requirements. So interaction is an important element of the requirements modeling, which is represented as the connection between the machine domain and problem domain as well as the problem domain and requirements. The Problem Frames approach emphasizes the effect of software to the real world and implements the transformation from the user requirements to software specifications in a smooth and logical way, by constructing a context diagram, and problem diagram to model the problem, and applying the Problem Progression method to deduce and transform the user requirements. However, there is a difficult problem to be resolved in this method, which is how to transform the problem diagrams systematically and preserve the correctness of the problem diagrams’ semantics as well as the requirements’traceability in the transformation process, in order to derive and verify the software specifications finally.The purpose of this paper is to keep the correctness of the problem diagram model’s semantics and requirements traceability in the problem transformation process. This paper applies Jackson’s Problem Progression and combines the Model-Driven method and the three rules, and then designs corresponding algorithms to implement them. Meanwhile, we use CSP language to give denotational semantics of the model transformation. This paper delivers the following research results, firstly it proposes a method and technical support for requirements traceability based on Problem Frames, which not only keeps the graphical traceability, but also implements natural language and formal semantics’ traceability in the problem transformation process. Therefore, it can greatly improve the practicability and rigorousness in the requirement analysis methods based on Problem Frames. Moreover, this paper also designs a computer aided support tool to implement the above requirements traceability, and give the corresponding implementation algorithms, which can semi-automatically realize the problem diagrams’ model transformation. This paper also uses a case study on smart home to validate the proposed method’s feasibility, and enhances the tool’s interactivity and understandability in the actual use.This paper describes a method and technical support for requirements traceability based on problems, tracing requirements in the problem transformation process and ensuring the correctness of the problem diagram’s semantics and representing the derived user requirement in text or formal notations by using the computer aided tool, which provides a method to derive software specification descriptions from elicited user requirements, accelerating the problem-oriented method’s step from theoretical research to practical application.