A formal framework for the impacts of design strategies on requirements

Abstract

One of the important tasks in requirements engineering is to identify the impacts of various design strategies on satisfying the requirements of the target system. This paper proposes a formal framework for studying the relationships between design strategies and requirements. The elasticity of imprecise requirements is captured using fuzzy logic, and design strategies are explicitly defined in terms of requirements. Based on such a formal framework, we have developed a systematic reasoning scheme for reasoning about the positive/negative impacts of design strategies on requirements. The framework can reduce the efforts in identifying requirement and design conflicts and assist the software engineers in evaluating design alternatives more effectively.