Assessing the maturity of requirements through argumentation: A good enough approach

Abstract

Requirements engineers need to be confident that enough requirements analysis has been done before a project can move forward. In the context of KAOS, this information can be derived from the soundness of the refinements: sound refinements indicate that the requirements in the goal-graph are mature enough or good enough for implementation. We can estimate how close we are to `good enough' requirements using the judgments of experts and other data from the goals. We apply Toulmin's model of argumentation to evaluate how sound refinements are. We then implement the resulting argumentation model using Bayesian Belief Networks and provide a semi-automated way aided by Natural Language Processing techniques to carry out the proposed evaluation. We have performed an initial validation on our work using a small case-study involving an electronic document management system.