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Managing Software Requirements Changes Based on Negotiation-Style Revision

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Abstract

For any proposed software project, when the software requirements specification has been established, requirements changes may result in not only a modification of the requirements specification but also a series of modifications of all existing artifacts during the development. Then it is necessary to provide effective and flexible requirements changes management. In this paper, we present an approach to managing requirements changes based on Booth's negotiation-style framework for belief revision. Informally, we consider the current requirements specification as a belief set about the system-to-be. The request of requirements change is viewed as new information about the same system-to-be. Then the process of executing the requirements change is a process of revising beliefs about the system-to-be. We design a family of belief negotiation models appropriate for different processes of requirements revision, including the setting of the request of requirements change being fully accepted, the setting of the current requirements specification being fully preserved, and that of the current specification and the request of requirements change reaching a compromise. In particular, the prioritization of requirements plays an important role in reaching an agreement in each belief negotiation model designed in this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Ke-Dian Mu (Member, CCF)

  2. School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, BT7 1NN, U.K.

    Weiru Liu, Jun Hong & David Bell

  3. Key Laboratory of High Confidence Software Technologies (Peking University), Ministry of Education School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Zhi Jin (Senior Member, CCF, IEEE)

Authors
  1. Ke-Dian Mu
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  2. Weiru Liu
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  3. Zhi Jin
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  4. Jun Hong
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  5. David Bell
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ke-Dian Mu.

Additional information

This work was partly supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60703061, the National Basic Research 973 Program of China under Grant No. 2009CB320701, the Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 90818026, and the NSFC & the British Royal Society China-UK Joint Project.

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Mu, KD., Liu, W., Jin, Z. et al. Managing Software Requirements Changes Based on Negotiation-Style Revision. J. Comput. Sci. Technol. 26, 890–907 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-011-0187-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11390-011-0187-y

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