Automatic Conflict Detection in Non-Functional Requirement Analysis using a Conceptual Graph
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Abstract
Non-functional requirement (NFR) is a complex problem. The conict of NFRs is a significant obstacle in the requirement analysis phase of software engineering because they can frequently contradict or interfere with other NFRs. Another aspect of the problem derives from the main character of NFRs, since many of them can be related to the same quality attribute. Our research has the objective of representing the NFR by introducing an automatic knowledge representation detection method using conceptual graphs to discover conicts among NFRs. It consists of extracting the NFR from the input software requirement specification document using NFR XML frame and then trying to detect any disputes between it and other NFRs. A billing system case study from a telecommunications company in Thailand yielded 353 NFR XML frames that could be extracted from the software specification document. These divide into Valid frames from complete NFRs, Incomplete NFR frames, and Invalid NFR frames. The accuracy of the extracting process resulted in a precision of 0.36, a recall of 0.92, and an F measure of 0.52. Moreover, these NFR XML frames revealed representative NFR conicts for 20 NFRs; and detected two NFRs as an NFR conict, and reported two NFRs as a potential NFR conict, otherwise known as a bad smell NFR to the system analyst for revising these concerns before submitting them the next development phase.
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