Reasoning with optional and preferred requirements

  • Authors:

  • Neil A. Ernst;John Mylopoulos;Alex Borgida;Ivan J. Jureta

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto;Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto;Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University;FNRS & Information Management, University of Namur

  • Venue:
  • ER'10 Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Conceptual modeling
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Of particular concern in requirements engineering is the selection of requirements to implement in the next release of a system. To that end, there has been recent work on multi-objective optimization and user-driven prioritization to support the analysis of requirements trade-offs. Such work has focused on simple, linear models of requirements; in this paper, we work with large models of interacting requirements. We present techniques for selecting sets of solutions to a requirements problem consisting of mandatory and optional goals, with preferences among them. To find solutions, we use a modified version of the framework from Sebastiani et al. [1] to label our requirements goal models. For our framework to apply to a problem, no numeric valuations are necessary, as the language is qualitative. We conclude by introducing a local search technique for navigating the exponential solution space. The algorithm is scalable and approximates the results of a naive but intractable algorithm.