D.3.3 ALGORITHMS FOR INCREMENTAL ... - SecureChange

6 Conclusions
In this paper we have presented an approach for handling change propagation and analyzing
the mutual impact between the requirement engineering and risk analysis domains.
Change propagation is based on conceptual mappings between the two domains
and a set of well-defined mapping rules that handle the change propagation at the model
level.
An important advantage of the approach is separation of concerns. Enforcing this
principle has the advantage that the respective processes can leverage on each other
while being conducted separately, and that the risk analysts do not need thorough expertise
in the requirement domain or the requirement modeling language, and vice versa.
They only need to have a high-level understanding of the mapped concepts. The changedriven
interplay is supported by the formalization of the mappings as VIATRA2 graph
transformation rules. The execution of the rules ensures the preservation of model consistency
between the two domains under change.
In this paper the approach has been applied to the SI* requirement framework and
the CORAS risk framework, although it is applicable also to alternative (competing) instantiations.
Indeed, the concepts that are mapped in the former – such as goal, resource,
and task – are in common to other goal-oriented approaches to requirement engineering.
The same holds for asset and treatments that are key concepts in other risk analysis
approaches. Thus, the validity of our approach goes beyond the demonstrated instantiations
in this paper; alternative approaches to requirement engineering and risk analysis
with similar underlying conceptual frameworks can be orchestrated by following the
same approach.
In risk analysis, one of the objectives is to identify and document treatments the
implementation of which ensures that the residual risk level is within the acceptable
threshold, whereas requirements engineering aims at achieving the identified goals to an
acceptable level. Thus, as future work, we plan to extend the framework with mapping
rules for relating the residual risk level with the achievement level such that propagations
are triggered also by changes to these. We moreover plan to extend the framework
in order to handle more complex changes than the atomic ones. A further topic for
future work is the definition of methods to handle conflicting changes such as a new
requirement contradicting existing treatments.
Acknowledgments. This work has been partially supported by the European Commission
under the 7th Framework Programme via the SecureChange (231101) project and
the NESSoS (256980) network of excellence.
References
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016, Carnegie Mellon University (2004)
2. Asnar, Y., Giorgini, P., Mylopoulos, J.: Goal-driven risk assessment in requirements engineering.
Requirements Engineering 16(2), 101–116 (2011)