Measuring Inconsistency in Requirements Specifications

Abstract

In the field of requirements engineering, measuring inconsistency is crucial to effective inconsistency management. A practical measure must consider both the degree and significance of inconsistency in specification. The main contribution of this paper is providing an approach for measuring inconsistent specification in terms of the priority-based scoring vector, which integrates the measure of the degree of inconsistency with the measure of the significance of inconsistency. In detail, for each specification Δ that consists of a set of requirements statements, if L is a m-level priority set, we define a m-dimensional priority-based significance vector $\vec{V}$ to measure the significance of the inconsistency in Δ. Furthermore, a priority-based scoring vector $\vec{S_p}$: $\mathcal{P}(\Delta) \longrightarrow N^{m+1}$ (Δ)→ N^m + 1 has been defined to provide an ordering relation over specifications that describes which specification is “more essentially inconsistent than” others.