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Composing requirements specifications from multiple prioritized sources

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Abstract

The formal methodology MultiSpec supports the evolution of software specifications gathered from multiple perspectives. A viewpoint-based approach is used to explicitly separate the descriptions provided by different stakeholders, and concentrate on identifying and resolving conflicts between them. The challenge addressed in this article consists in taking into account that some views may have greater degrees of relevance and, consequently, their opinion will have more importance when either obtaining the merged model or resolving the contradictions. To this end, we propose a priority-based approach, where such priority value is twofold. On the one hand, it considers external factors to the perspectives such as the importance assigned to each view by the analyst depending on who is specifying the view or the amount of stakeholders involved in that specification. On the other hand, this priority value also considers internal factors related to the quality of the views and, in order to be able to quantify this value, MultiSpec proposes two measures: coverage and density of each perspective which will be combined in a completeness value. The contributions of this approach will be clearly illustrated through a simple example.

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Notes

  1. Notation: \(a \rightsquigarrow b\) means that a evolves into b.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the Xunta de Galicia Basic Research Project PGIDT04PXIB32201PR and by the Consellería de Educación e Ordenación Universitaria (Xunta de Galicia) incentives file 2007/000016-0. We thank Anthony Hunter for his insightful suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. Our thanks are also given to the reviewers for their valuable feedback and helpful comments that have contributed to increase the quality of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Telematic Engineering Department, University of Vigo, 36310, Vigo, Spain

    Ana Belén Barragáns Martínez, José J. Pazos Arias, Ana Fernández Vilas, Jorge García Duque, Martín López Nores, Rebeca P. Díaz Redondo & Yolanda Blanco Fernández

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  1. Ana Belén Barragáns Martínez
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  2. José J. Pazos Arias
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  3. Ana Fernández Vilas
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  7. Yolanda Blanco Fernández
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Correspondence to Ana Belén Barragáns Martínez.

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Barragáns Martínez, A.B., Pazos Arias, J.J., Fernández Vilas, A. et al. Composing requirements specifications from multiple prioritized sources. Requirements Eng 13, 187–206 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-008-0064-6

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