Prototype Description

DealScribe

Project Members 

Principle Investigators

Dr. William N. Robinson

Collaborators

 

Current members

 

Past members

John Marsh, S. Pawlowski, Piyush Raizada, Songsin Srisunt, Siwen Zhao.

Project Summary

 

DealScribe provides a WWW interface to the negotiation dialog. This "negotiation" dialog may be a classic negotiation protocol, such as found in contracting, or it may simply be an informal dialog, such as found in requirement development.

 

The requirements dialog support system was designed to provide solutions to the problems of development goal monitoring, as well as address basic needs of requirement dialog support. The needs include the following.

  • The need to represent multiple stakeholder requirements, even if conflicting.
  • The need to identify and understand requirements interactions.
  • The need to track and report on development issues.
  • The need to develop shared understanding and consensus through requirements analysis and negotiation.
  • The need to support dynamic, dialog-driven requirements development.

Stakeholder dialog is central to these needs. Additionally, analysts must be able to analyze the developing requirements. The needs can be supported through a dialog support system and its meta-model.

We have defined a dialog support system and its dialog meta-model. As illustrated in figure 1, the dialog system regards a dialog as a stream of statements. Each statement is either passive information or an active operation. Statements are instances of the dialog statement model. A dialog is a continual stream of statements from multiple stakeholders; some statements initiate new ideas, others are in response to previous statements. As the dialog expands, dialog goals can be compared against the dialog to determine their status.

The meta-model can be instantiated to define a typical process model, with a distinction of process and product. Consider information statements as products, operation statements as actions, and dialog goals as defining a process model. As such, the dialog meta-model is a process model with an explicit representation of the process goals and enactment history. Such a meta-model is suitable for modeling the process of requirements development.

The phrase, dialog meta-model was chosen, rather than the more common phrase process model, due to the specialized modeling of dialog processes and the use of meta-modeling. The dialog meta-model can be instantiated to aid the contextual needs of a development group. The dialog support system provides a user interface tailored to the instantiated dialog model. As stakeholders engage in the dialog, the dialog support system provides automated processing; for example, notifying stakeholders of interesting dialog events, such as a violation of a dialog goal.

 

DealScribe is built on two existing tools:

  • HyperNews provides a discussion system similar to Usenet News, but it has a World Wide Web interface. In each forum a user can post typed text messages. A message may be posted to the forum, or in response to a particular message. A WWW view of the forum can provide an overview of the discussion, where messages are laid out in a tree format that shows replies to a message indented under it. HyperNews provides various views of a forum, user notification of new responses, an email interface, security, and administrative functions.
  • ConceptBase is a deductive database that provides a concurrent multi-user access to O-Telos objects. All classes, meta classes, instances, attributes, rules, constraints, and queries are uniformly represented as objects. ConceptBase itself operates as a server, while clients, such as ConceptBase's graphical browser communicate via internet protocols. ConceptBase has shown to be a powerful tool for systems development, partly because of its ability to simultaneously represent and query, instances, classes, and meta-classes.

Project Papers

Many of Dr. Robinson's publications are available on-line at his bibliography page.

  • W.N. Robinson, S. Pawlowski, Managing Requirements Inconsistency with Development Goal Monitors, IEEE, Transactions on Software Engineering, Nov/Dec 1999.

 

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