Project Description

Requirements Interaction Management

Project Members 

Principle Investigators

Dr. William N. Robinson

Collaborators

Dr. Stephen Fickas, Dr. Sol Greenspan

Current members

Tuong M Vu

Past members

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

Project Summary

 

The defining characteristic of requirements quality engineering is the ability to achieve multiple quality requirements such as, maximize security and minimize cost. While single quality methods have been developed-for example, to minimize latency or maximize throughput-such methods typically apply to one quality of one system component. Modern information systems are composed of many such components. Moreover, with the growth of object-oriented methods and networked system deployment, component interactions will increase. Satisfactorily achieving all system qualities through component composition is extremely difficult. Achieving certain qualities for one system component can detract from the qualities of another system component. Discovering, tracking, and resolving conflicting quality interactions among system components at requirements definition time remains an open problem. We call this the Requirements Interaction Management problem.

 

Current focus

Increasing analyst understanding of the interactions among non-functional requirements through simulation.

Automated instrumentation of software for the purpose of monitoring non-functional requirements.

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.
  • Robinson, W.N., Volkov, S., Supporting the Negotiation Life-Cycle, ACM, Communications of the ACM, May, 1998, pp. 95-102.
  • Robinson, W.N., Interactive Decision Support for Requirements Negotiation, Concurrent Engineering: Research & Applications, Special Issue on Conflict Management in Concurrent Engineering, The Institute of Concurrent Engineering, 1994 (2) 237-252.
  • W.N. Robinson, S. Pawlowski, Surfacing Root Requirements Interactions from Inquiry Cycle Requirements, International Conference on Requirements Engineering, IEEE, April 6-10, 1998, Colorado Springs, CO, pp. 82-89.
  • W.N. Robinson, I Didn't Know My Requirements were Consistent until I Talked to My Analyst, Living With Inconsistency Workshop at The 19th International Conference on Software Engineering, IEEE Computer Society Press, Boston, USA (May 17-24 1997).
  • W.N. Robinson, S. Volkov, A Meta-Model for Restructuring Stakeholder Requirements, Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Software Engineering, IEEE Computer Society Press, Boston, USA (May 17-24 1997), pp. 140 -149.
  • Robinson, W.N., Electronic Brokering for Assisted Contracting of Software Applets, IEEE, Proceedings of the 30th Annual Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, January 7-10 1997, pp. 449-458.
  • Robinson, W.N., Automated Assistance for Conflict Resolution in Multiple Perspective Systems Analysis and Operation, ACM Workshop on Viewpoints in Software Development, In Association with the ACM Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering, San Francisco, USA, October 14th & 15th, 1996.
  • Robinson, W.N., Goal-Oriented Workflow Analysis and Infrastructure, National Science Foundation, Workshop on Workflow & Process Automation Workshop, Athens, GA, 1996 pp. 31-37. (Also, available as Georgia State University, Working Paper CIS-96-07, May 1996.)
  • Robinson, W.N., Fickas, S. Supporting Multi-Perspective Requirements Engineering, First International Conference on Requirements Engineering, IEEE, (April 18-22 1994) 206-215.

Project Tools

Software Prototypes

A project page for the DealMaker prototype is available.

A project page for the DealScribe prototype is available.

Related WWW pages