Composing Features by Managing Inconsistent Requirements

Abstract. One approach to system development is to decompose the requirements into features and specify the individual features before composing them. A major limitation of deferring feature composition is that inconsistency between the solutions to individual features may not be uncovered early in the development, leading to unwanted feature interactions. Syntactic inconsistencies arising from the way software artefacts are described can be addressed by the use of explicit, shared, domain knowledge. However, behavioural inconsistencies are more challenging: they may occur within the requirements associated with two or more features as well as at the level of individual features. Whilst approaches exist that address behavioural inconsistencies at design time, these are overrestrictive in ruling out all possible conflicts and may weaken the requirements further than is desirable. In this paper, we present a lightweight approach to dealing with behavioural inconsistencies at run-time. R...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: FIW
• Authors: Robin C. Laney, Thein Than Tun, Michael Jackson, Bashar Nuseibeh
• Keywords: Behavioural Inconsistencies, Communications, Feature Interaction, FIW 2007, Individual Features