Identifying and Modeling Non-Functional Concerns Relationships

Requirements elicitation step is of paramount importance in the requirements engineering process. In the distributed environment of so-called inter-company cooperative information system, this step is a thorny issue. To elicit requirements for an inter-company cooperative information system, we early proposed a methodology called MAMIE (from MAcro to MIcro level requirements Elicitation) with an accompanied tool. In MAMIE methodology, requirements are the result of composing functional and non-functional concerns. Before non-functional concerns composition, it’s primary to identify relationships between them. According to the most existing approaches, a non-functional concern may have a negative, positive or null contribution on the other non-functional concerns. In this paper, we argue that using only these three contributions types is not sufficient to express relationships which may exist between non-functional concerns. Thus, we propose a process which aims to identify non-functional concerns’ relationships and model them using a fuzzy cognitive map. The resulting model is composed of non-functional concerns, relationships between them and the weight of these relationships expressed with linguistics fuzzy values. Using fuzzy cognitive maps to model non-functional concerns relationships allows moving from the conventional modelling toward developing a computer based model. An example from the textile industry is used to illustrate the applicability of our process.