TY - GEN
T1 - From stakeholder requirements to formal specifications through refinement
AU - Li, Feng Lin
AU - Horkoff, Jennifer
AU - Borgida, Alexander
AU - Guizzardi, Giancarlo
AU - Liu, Lin
AU - Mylopoulos, John
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015.
PY - 2015
Y1 - 2015
N2 - [Context and motivation] Stakeholder requirements are notoriously informal, vague, ambiguous and often unattainable. The requirements engineering problem is to formalize these requirements and then transform them through a systematic process into a formal specification that can be handed over to designers for downstream development. [Question/problem] This paper proposes a framework for transforming informal requirements to formal ones, and then to a specification. [Principal ideas/results] The framework consists of an ontology of requirements, a formal requirements modeling language for representing both functional and non-functional requirements, as well as a rich set of refinement operators whereby requirements are incrementally transformed into a formal, practically satisfiable and measurable specification. [Contributions] Our proposal includes a systematic, tool-supported methodology for conducting this transformation. For evaluation, we have applied our framework to a public requirements dataset. The results of our evaluation suggest that our ontology and modeling language are adequate for capturing requirements, and our methodology is effective in handling requirements in practice.
AB - [Context and motivation] Stakeholder requirements are notoriously informal, vague, ambiguous and often unattainable. The requirements engineering problem is to formalize these requirements and then transform them through a systematic process into a formal specification that can be handed over to designers for downstream development. [Question/problem] This paper proposes a framework for transforming informal requirements to formal ones, and then to a specification. [Principal ideas/results] The framework consists of an ontology of requirements, a formal requirements modeling language for representing both functional and non-functional requirements, as well as a rich set of refinement operators whereby requirements are incrementally transformed into a formal, practically satisfiable and measurable specification. [Contributions] Our proposal includes a systematic, tool-supported methodology for conducting this transformation. For evaluation, we have applied our framework to a public requirements dataset. The results of our evaluation suggest that our ontology and modeling language are adequate for capturing requirements, and our methodology is effective in handling requirements in practice.
KW - Functional requirements
KW - Nonfunctional requirements
KW - Ontologies
KW - Requirements modeling language
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84930470924&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84930470924&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-16101-3_11
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-16101-3_11
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84930470924
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 164
EP - 180
BT - Requirements Engineering
A2 - Fricker, Samuel A.
A2 - Schneider, Kurt
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 21st International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality, REFSQ 2015
Y2 - 23 March 2015 through 26 March 2015
ER -