A Rough-Set Theory based Approach for the Detection of Requirements Discordances among Stakeholders of an Information System

Abstract

Detection of discordances among the stakeholders is an important activity of stakeholders’ analysis process which needs to be completed prior to starting of the software requirements elicitation process. Various fuzzy based methods have been developed for the detection of discordances among the stakeholders in which vague or uncertain statements of stakeholders’ perceptions on software requirements are expressed by linguistic terms. Based on our review, we found that these methods focus on subjective justifications and lacks objectivity, and as a result it may affect the stakeholders’ analysis process and subsequently may lead to inappropriate decision-making during the information system development process. Therefore, to address this issue, in this paper we developed a method for the detection of discordances among stakeholders of an information system using rough-set theory. The implementation of the proposed method is discussed by considering the stakeholders and requirements of library information system.

Keywords

Functional requirements / non-functional requirements / fuzzy logic / rough-set theory / information system / software requirements elicitation

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Systems Engineering Society of China and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany