Consolidating multiple requirement specifications through argumentation

  • Authors:

  • Ebrahim Bagheri;Faezeh Ensan

  • Affiliations:

  • Athabasca University and National Research Council Canada;University of New Brunswick

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2011 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

The process of handling inconsistencies in software requirements is an important and challenging task. Most often in cases where multiple stakeholders interact with the requirement analysts, inconsistent, discrepant and conflicting information is gathered that needs to be understood and interpreted properly. Recent research has suggested that despite the fact that inconsistencies are not desirable by nature, they can be tolerated in order to better understand the nature of the problem domain and the stakeholders' line of thought. With this in mind, we propose an argumentative approach towards handling inconsistent requirement specifications. In our semi-formal approach, we build on Dung's abstract argumentation framework and represent requirement statements as arguments. This way we are able to model the interaction of the requirement statements in terms of their inconsistencies and also provide a decision support process for the resolution of inconsistencies. We discuss our approach in detail through a widely used case study and introduce our Eclipse plugin tool supporting the proposed work.