Measuring inconsistency in requirements specifications

  • Authors:

  • Kedian Mu;Zhi Jin;Ruqian Lu;Weiru Liu

  • Affiliations:

  • Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R.China;Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R.China;Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, P.R.China;School of Computer Science, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland

  • Venue:
  • ECSQARU'05 Proceedings of the 8th European conference on Symbolic and Quantitative Approaches to Reasoning with Uncertainty
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

In the field of requirements engineering, measuring inconsistency is crucial to effective inconsistency management. A practical measure must consider both the degree and significance of inconsistency in specification. The main contribution of this paper is providing an approach for measuring inconsistent specification in terms of the priority-based scoring vector, which integrates the measure of the degree of inconsistency with the measure of the significance of inconsistency. In detail, for each specification Δ that consists of a set of requirements statements, if L is a m-level priority set, we define a m-dimensional priority-based significance vector $\vec{V}$ to measure the significance of the inconsistency in Δ. Furthermore, a priority-based scoring vector $\vec{S_p}$: $\mathcal{P}(\Delta) \longrightarrow N^{m+1}$ (Δ)→ Nm+1 has been defined to provide an ordering relation over specifications that describes which specification is “more essentially inconsistent than” others.