Using abduction and induction for operational requirements elaboration

Requirements Engineering involves the elicitation of high-level stakeholder goals and their refinement into operational system requirements. A key difficulty is that stakeholders typically convey their goals indirectly through intuitive narrative-style scenarios of desirable and undesirable system b...

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Autores principales: Alrajeh, D., Ray, O., Russo, A., Uchitel, S.
Formato: JOUR
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Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12110/paper_15708683_v7_n3_p275_Alrajeh
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Sumario:Requirements Engineering involves the elicitation of high-level stakeholder goals and their refinement into operational system requirements. A key difficulty is that stakeholders typically convey their goals indirectly through intuitive narrative-style scenarios of desirable and undesirable system behaviour, whereas goal refinement methods usually require goals to be expressed declaratively using, for instance, a temporal logic. In actual software engineering practice, the extraction of formal requirements from scenario-based descriptions is a tedious and error-prone process that would benefit from automated tool support. This paper presents an Inductive Logic Programming method for inferring operational requirements from a set of example scenarios and an initial but incomplete requirements specification. The approach is based on translating the specification and the scenarios into an event-based logic programming formalism and using a non-monotonic reasoning system, called eXtended Hybrid Abductive Inductive Learning, to automatically infer a set of event pre-conditions and trigger-conditions that cover all desirable scenarios and reject all undesirable ones. This learning task is a novel application of logic programming to requirements engineering that also demonstrates the utility of non-monotonic learning capturing pre-conditions and trigger-conditions. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.