Handling Inconsistency In Distributed Software Requirements Specifications Based On Prioritized Merging

Developing a desirable framework for handling inconsistencies in software requirements specifications is a challenging problem. It has been widely recognized that the relative priority of requirements can help developers to make some necessary trade-off decisions for resolving conflicts. Address for correspondence: Kedian Mu, School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, P.R. China Thanks to four anonymous referees for valuable comments and suggestions on improving the paper. Funding was provided in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60703061, the National 863 High-tech Project of China under Grant No. 2006AA01Z155, the Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 90818026, and the NSFC and the British Royal Society China-UK Joint Project. Funding was provided in part by the National Natural Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars of China under Grant No. 60625204, the National Key Research and Development Program of China under Grant No. 2002CB312004, and the Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 90818026. Funding was provided in part by the Key Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.60496324. 2 K. Mu et al. / Handling Inconsistency in Distributed Software Requirements Specifications Based... However, for most distributed development such as viewpoints-based approaches, different stakeholders may assign different levels of priority to the same shared requirements statement from their own perspectives. The disagreement in the local levels of priority assigned to the same shared requirements statement often puts developers into a dilemma during the inconsistency handling process. The main contribution of this paper is to present a prioritized merging-based framework for handling inconsistency in distributed software requirements specifications. Given a set of distributed inconsistent requirements collections with the local prioritization, we first construct a requirements specification with a prioritization from an overall perspective. We provide two approaches to constructing a requirements specification with the global prioritization, including a merging-based construction and a priority vector-based construction. Following this, we derive proposals for handling inconsistencies from the globally prioritized requirements specification in terms of prioritized merging. Moreover, from the overall perspective, these proposals may be viewed as the most appropriate to modifying the given inconsistent requirements specification in the sense of the ordering relation over all the consistent subsets of the requirements specification. Finally, we consider applying negotiation-based techniques to viewpoints so as to identify an acceptable common proposal from these proposals.