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The need to deal with conflicting system requirements has become increasingly important over the past several years. Often, these requirements are elastic in that they can be satisfied to a degree. The overall goal of this research is l o develop a formal framework that facilitates the identification and the trade08 analysis of conflicting requirements b y ezplicitly capturing their elasticity. Based on a fuzzy set theoretic foundation for representing imprecise requirements, we describe a systematic approach for analyzing the tradeoffs between conflicting requirements using the techniques in decision science. The systematic trade08 analyses are used for three important tasks in the requirement engineering process: (1) for validating the structure used in aggregating prioritized requirements, (2) for identifying the structures and the parameters of the underlying representation of imprecise requirenients, and (3) for assessing the priorities of conflicting requirements. We illustrate these techniques using the requirements of a conference room scheduling system. 1090-705W97 $5.00 0 1997 IEEE

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Requirement analysis is one of the most critical and timeconsuming steps in the software development process. Requirements are usually vague and imprecise in nature. They often conflict with each other and many conflicts are implicit and difficult to identify. Moreover, accessing the customer's trade-off preferences among the conflicting requirements is challenging. A CASE tool that assists the software developer in identifying conflicting requirements and in analyzing trade-off relationship can be useful. In this paper, we introduce a tool for the Specification, the Trade-off, and the Analysis for the Requirements (STAR). We briefly describe the formal foundation for STAR, which uses fuzzy logic to specify imprecise requirements. STAR has a set of heuristics for inferring cooperative and conflicting relationships between requirements. Once the conflicting requirements are identified, STAR supports a systemic approach for assessing the relative priority between conflicting requirements.

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