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Specifying and analyzing early requirements in Tropos

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Abstract

We present a framework that supports the formal verification of early requirements specifications. The framework is based on Formal Tropos, a specification language that adopts primitive concepts for modeling early requirements (such as actor, goal, and strategic dependency), along with a rich temporal specification language. We show how existing formal analysis techniques, and in particular model checking, can be adapted for the automatic verification of Formal Tropos specifications. These techniques have been implemented in a tool, called the T-Tool, that maps Formal Tropos specifications into a language that can be handled by the NuSMV model checker. Finally, we evaluate our methodology on a course-exam management case study. Our experiments show that formal analysis reveals gaps and inconsistencies in early requirements specifications that are by no means trivial to discover without the help of formal analysis tools.

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Notes

  1. A more complete early requirements model should include also other actors, like the teaching assistant and the secretariat. For presentation purposes, in this paper we concentrate only on the two main actors, student and teacher.

  2. Notice that the value of attribute passed is only relevant once the dependency has been fulfilled, therefore we do not care if it changes before its fulfillment.

  3. This is an example of “abstraction” technique, since the verification is done on a more general specification that is obtained by removing irrelevant details. Abstraction techniques are common practice in the model checking community, see for instance [20].

  4. The experiments confirm that this is a reasonable bound: all generated witness scenarios and counter-examples are of length 5 or shorter.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partly supported by the MIUR-FIRB Project RBNE0195K5 “Automated Knowledge-Level Software Engineering”.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, 40 St. George St., Toronto, M5S 2E4, Canada

    Ariel Fuxman, Lin Liu & John Mylopoulos

  2. Department of Information and Communication Technology, University of Trento, Via Sommarive 14, I-38050, Trento, Italy

    Marco Pistore

  3. ITC-irst, Via Sommarive 18, I-38050, Trento, Italy

    Marco Roveri & Paolo Traverso

Authors
  1. Ariel Fuxman
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  2. Lin Liu
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  3. John Mylopoulos
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  4. Marco Pistore
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  5. Marco Roveri
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  6. Paolo Traverso
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Correspondence to Marco Roveri.

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Fuxman, A., Liu, L., Mylopoulos, J. et al. Specifying and analyzing early requirements in Tropos. Requirements Eng 9, 132–150 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-004-0191-7

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