"SHORT"er Reasoning About Larger Requirements Models

TL;DR

SHORT is a tool that identifies key decisions in complex Requirements Engineering models, enabling much faster reasoning and optimization by focusing stakeholder discussions on these critical points.

Contribution

The paper introduces the SHORT tool that efficiently finds key decisions in RE models, significantly speeding up reasoning and optimization processes.

Findings

Keys constitute about 12% of all decisions in models.

Using keys accelerates reasoning by 100 to 1000 times.

SHORT runs in polynomial time and handles large models within minutes.

Abstract

When Requirements Engineering(RE) models are unreasonably complex, they cannot support efficient decision making. SHORT is a tool to simplify that reasoning by exploiting the "key" decisions within RE models. These "keys" have the property that once values are assigned to them, it is very fast to reason over the remaining decisions. Using these "keys", reasoning about RE models can be greatly SHORTened by focusing stakeholder discussion on just these key decisions. This paper evaluates the SHORT tool on eight complex RE models. We find that the number of keys are typically only 12% of all decisions. Since they are so few in number, keys can be used to reason faster about models. For example, using keys, we can optimize over those models (to achieve the most goals at least cost) two to three orders of magnitude faster than standard methods. Better yet, finding those keys is not difficult: SHORT runs in low order polynomial time and terminates in a few minutes for the largest models.