Desiree: a Refinement Calculus for Requirements Problems

TL;DR

Desiree is a formal requirements calculus and tool that systematically refines stakeholder requirements into clear, consistent, and operational specifications, addressing common issues like ambiguity and incompleteness.

Contribution

The paper introduces Desiree, a formal framework with semantics, operators, and a graphical tool for transforming informal requirements into eligible specifications.

Findings

Defined semantics for requirement modeling concepts

Developed a graphical tool supporting the framework

Demonstrated reasoning tasks with a Meeting Scheduler example

Abstract

The requirements elicited from stakeholders are typically informal, incomplete, ambiguous, and inconsistent. It is the task of Requirements Engineering to transform them into an eligible (formal, sufficiently complete, unambiguous, consistent, modifiable and traceable) requirements specification of functions and qualities that the system-to-be needs to operationalize. To address this requirements problem, we have proposed Desiree, a requirements calculus for systematically transforming stakeholder requirements into an eligible specification. In this paper, we define the semantics of the concepts used to model requirements, and that of the operators used to refine and operationalize requirements. We present a graphical modeling tool that supports the entire framework, including the nine concepts, eight operators and the transformation methodology. We use a Meeting Scheduler example to illustrate the kinds of reasoning tasks that we can perform based on the given semantics.