SEKE 2012 Proceedings - Knowledge Systems Institute

Requirement Analysis and Automated Verif cation:
A semantic approach
Animesh Dutta
Department of Information technology
National Institute of Technology
Durgapur
India
Email:animeshrec@gmail.com
Prajna Devi upadhyay
Department of Information technology
National Institute of Technology
Durgapur
India
Email: kirtu26@gmail.com
Sudipta Acharya
Department of Information technology
National Institute of Technology
Durgapur
India
Email: sonaacharya.2009@gmail.com
Abstract—In this paper, we propose an automated software
development methodology. The methodology is conceptualized
with the notion of agents, which are autonomous goal-driven
software entities. Initially, the requirements of the newly proposed
system are captured from stakeholders which are then analyzed
in goal oriented model and represented as goal graph. The
leaf level atomic sub goals of the goal graph are taken as
input to our automated system. These atomic sub goals are
mapped to concepts in Domain Ontology and are verified with
the help of three verification metrics- Completeness, Correctness,
and Conflict. We also develop a software tool for the proposed
automated system.
I. INTRODUCTION
Requirements engineering is an important phase of the
software development methodology. Requiremets should be
documented as the SRS(Software Requirement Specif cation),
which is the input to the design phase. To ensure that the
requirements are in correct form, requirement analysis and
verf cation process should detect incomplete, incorrect and
ambiguous requirements. Nowadays, requirement verf cation
techniques supported by domain knowledge are in use which
check the specif ed requirements against the domain knowledge
for inconsistencies and help the system analyst to remove
them. Ontology [1] is the most suitable representation of
domain knowledge because concepts, relationships and their
categorizations in a real world can be represented with them.
It also allows for semantic processing of requirements. The
automation of the requirement verif cation process complements
transformation systems utilised for Agent Oriented
Software Engineering(AOSE) methodologies [2], [3], [4].
Transformation systems generate system architecture from
the specif ed requirements automatically by consulting with
Domain Ontology.
II. RELATED WORK
There have been a signif cant number of contributions in the
area of Ontology based requirement verif cation. In [5], [6],
[7] authors have used Domain Ontology to express domain
knowledge and have used it for the semantic verif cation
of requirements using metrics. The tool development for
the proposed methodologies is not shown. [8] This paper
proposes a novel user-driven requirements elicitation process
UDREP. Based on users individualities and context, support
for users to present requirements is provided, including the
recommendation of domain assets and advice about multiuser
cooperation. It lacks of verif cation metrics to measure
the quality of requirement specif cation. In [9], authors
have proposed AGORA, a method for requirements elicitation
which is an extended version of a goal-oriented method by
attaching preference and contribution attributes to an AND-
OR graph. They have also def ned some metrics to measure the
quality of requirement specif cation. In [10], authors propose
a method called GOORE where a domain ontology is utilized
to support goal decomposition as domain knowledge. A tool
has also been developed to facilitate the same. Some more
tools to facilitate verif cation have been developed in [11],
[12]. These tools are not the part of any automated system.
III. SCOPE OF WORK
There have been a lot of contributions in the area of Ontology
based requirements verif cation techniques. But, most of
them are a part of traditional software development methodologies.
Also, very few contributions have elicited requirements
verif cation approach for automated systems. Although
automated software development methodologies reduce the
gap between requirements specif cation and system design,
there is a need to incorporate a requirements verif cation
module to determine whether user requirements have been
fully expressed or not in such systems. The lack of verif cation
in traditional as well as automated software development
methodologies lead to inconsistent systems which may not
adhere completely to user’s requirements.
This paper presents requirements verif cation approach
for the automated software development methodology using
agents which we proposed in [13]. The proposed methodology
takes the requirement represented as goal graph, the
domain knowledge represented as Ontology and determines
whether the requirements have been expressed properly. The
verif cation is performed against domain Ontology and the
result is expressed in the form of three metrics-Completeness,
Correctness, and Conf ict. A software tool is also developed to
facilitate automation of the verif cation procedure of the input
requirements.
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