Arshinder Kaur

In the software development cycle, requirements engineering plays a major role in the success of a software system. In early requirement engineering, various alternative design options for software are explored and the best ones are selected. The requirements analyst uses goal models to analyse different design alternatives. Goal models like the i∗, and Tropos include inter-actor dependencies where an actor depends on other actors for its goal accomplishment. However, goal models like Non-Functional Requirements(NFR), Knowledge Acquisition in Automated Space (KAOS) do not include these type of inter-actor dependencies. Whilst there have been a number of both qualitative and quantitative proposed approaches to analysing goal models without using inter-actor dependency, this paper presents an approach to the automate analysis of goals using inter-actor dependencies and fuzzy concepts. A simulation for the proposed approach was developed in Visual C++ and was evaluated with case studies from the existing literature. The evaluation results show that the proposed approach is feasible and offers a guidance in the decision making of alternative options.

Requirement analysis involves elicitation of suitable functions or operations and relevant data to support software. A requirement analyst examines different alternative options to decide on an optimal alternative option that benefits the stakeholders of the system. The decision making of alternative design option is complicated by the unavailable or incomplete and imprecise input data. Optimisation, an operation research technique, can be used as a method to solve this problem. The goal-oriented framework, such as i∗ is used to present social models for the analysis of a software system during the early phase of the requirement's engineering process. This paper aims to develop an optimisation model for the i∗ goal models, using multi-objective optimisation. The optimisation model aims to fully automate the goal analysis and to handle large goal models. A simulation for the proposed approach was developed by integrating Visual C++ with Matlab and was evaluated with case studies from the existing literature. The evaluation results show that the proposed approach is feasible and offers guidance in the decision making of alternative options.

Non-functional or quality requirements such as usability, integrity and security play a significant part in the success of a software system. Non-functional requirements have more impact on software systems than the functional requirements. In the early phase of requirements engineering, the various design options for the functional behaviour (also known as the goal) of a software system are analysed and the perfect ones are chosen. In the goal analysis process, the goals that contribute to the maximum satisfaction of the non-functional requirements (also known as the softgoals) have to be selected. Whilst there have been a number of approaches for goal analysis, this paper focuses on the softgoals based optimisation model to select goals for a given i∗ framework. This paper presents a multi-objective goal programming optimisation model to guide the goal analysis. A simulation for this approach was developed in Java Eclipse integrated with the IBM Cplex optimisation tool and evaluated with goal models such as Telemedicine, and Kids Youth counseling which were taken from the Requirements Engineering (RE) literature. The results of the evaluation show that the proposed optimal goal model approach is beneficial in the decision making of functional goals.