Section: New Results

Requirement Engineering

Participants : Zeina Azmeh, Isabelle Mirbel, Serena Villata.

Requirements engineering is an essential process of software engineering, during which the complete behavior of a software system can be defined. The success of this process plays a crucial role in the success of the whole software project. A key issue of requirements engineering is stakeholders participation, which is facilitated through the emergence of online collaborative working tools. These tools create new opportunities of practice regarding requirements elicitation. Nevertheless, they result in an information overload lacking structure and semantics. Consequently, requirements analysis and selection become more challenging.

Our current proposition is embodied in an approach based on Semantic Web languages as well as concept lattices to identify relevant communities of stakeholders depending on their past participation. These communities can be used to enable efficient decision-making and handling of requirements.

We exploited the idea of applying argumentation theory to deal with requirements engineering. In particular, the proposed framework detects consistent sets of goal-based requirements and maintains their consistency over time based on argumentation theory which allows to detect the conflicts among elements. More specifically, the framework relies on meta-argumentation, which instantiates abstract argumentation frameworks, where requirements are represented as arguments and the standard Dung-like argumentation framework is extended with additional relations between goal-based requirements. The results of this research have been published to the CLIMA international workshop [37] .