An ontological approach to specify conflicts among nonfunctional requirements

Abstract

It is a usual practice for a user to narrate the Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) in natural language and the requirements engineers manually try to express the same, using semi-formal or formal language notations. However, inaccurate and the laborious manual approach may fail to detect all potential NFRs and conflicts among them. Existing solutions for specifying NFRs are based on a graphical representation that requires manual efforts. Furthermore, they do not take into account the classification of the types of conflicting NFRs that helps to prioritize NFRs. In addition, these approaches are not used in industrial practice due to three main reasons viz. 1) High manual inference 2) Sharing and reusing work can be difficult and 3) No support for machine understanding. Therefore, the aim of our research is to formally specify conflicting NFRs from available natural language NFRs by means of ontological representation that helps requirements analysts prioritize the NFRs at an early stage of requirements engineering. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.