Towards a Theory of Requirements Elicitation: Acceptability Condition for the Relative Validity of Requirements

TL;DR

This paper introduces a formal framework for assessing the relative validity of requirements artifacts through a new language, acceptability condition, and automated reasoning procedures to ensure stakeholder agreement.

Contribution

It proposes a novel formal language and reasoning methods to automatically verify the acceptability of requirements discussions, advancing requirements validation techniques.

Findings

The acceptability condition effectively signals valid requirements artifacts.

Automated reasoning procedures can verify discussions captured in the proposed language.

The framework facilitates stakeholder agreement assessment in requirements engineering.

Abstract

A requirements engineering artifact is valid relative to the stakeholders of the system-to-be if they agree on the content of that artifact. Checking relative validity involves a discussion between the stakeholders and the requirements engineer. This paper proposes (i) a language for the representation of information exchanged in a discussion about the relative validity of an artifact; (ii) the acceptability condition, which, when it verifies in a discussion captured in the proposed language, signals that the relative validity holds for the discussed artifact and for the participants in the discussion; and (iii) reasoning procedures to automatically check the acceptability condition in a discussions captured by the proposed language.