iRE: A semantic network based interactive requirements engineering framework

Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) involves processing informal natural language descriptions of system requirements into an integrated and structured formal specification. The traditional RE process is ad-hoc, laborious, time-consuming, and error-prone manual process. For large-scale software intensive systems, the RE process becomes very difficult to manage. It is further complicated by ill-defined, incomplete, and redundantly specified requirements. To streamline the process, an end-to-end seamless RE framework is therefore needed. In this paper, we present an overview of an end-to-end semi-automated changetolerant interactive requirements engineering (iRE) framework. It keeps and maintains the meta-level information of the interrelated requirements models into a semantic network model (SNM), and provides a method and processing system to derive an integrated and structured model. The iRE involves the requirements analysts in an interactive fashion during the modeling process.

Formalisation of the integration of behavior trees

“…Assume that the relations between m5 & m6 and m5 & m7 have been accepted by the requirements analyst. Informally, we say an SNM is well-formed, if (1) the SNM is a directed acyclic graph, (2) the number of Init models in the SNM is 1, (3) all models are IN, and (4) all existing relations are IN [3]. We use childs(mi) and parents(mi) to denote child and parent BMs respectively.…”

“…SNM: An SNM captures the BMs and their interrelations into an annotated graph, which stores their meta-level information such as their acceptability states (Included (IN), Excluded (EX) and Undecided(UN)), the confidences of the BMs to be Included in the specification and the similarity measure of the parent and child BUs for a relation etc [3].…”

“…1(a) shows a BT of a requirement (ID: R2) of a Security Alarm System (SAS) [3,17]. It mentions the initialisation scenarios for activating the SAS.…”

“…In this paper, we first provide the semantic integration of two interrelated BTs using an extended version of CSPσ. We then use a Semantic Network Model (SNM) [3] to capture a set of interrelated BTs, and develop algorithm to integrate them all into one BT. This formalisation facilitates developing (semi-)automated tools for modeling the requirements of large-scale software intensive systems.…”

BERDD: A Behaviour Engineering-Based Approach for Requirements Defects Detection

“…• To represent requirements in a formal specification, we propose an algorithm that converts system requirements represented in semi-formal language, i.e.BT, into formal language, Web Ontology Language (OWL). One of the advantages of this approach is that BTs, a semi-formal modelling notation introduced in Behaviour Engineering (BE), has been an ideal bridge to connect software requirements in natural languages to their formal representations [16]- [18]. Therefore, it helps the customers to verify the accuracy of the formal representation.…”