Towards ontology-driven requirements engineering

Abstract

Requirements Engineering has a huge impact on success or failure of a software project. However, the acquisition, specification and evolution of goals and requirements from different stakeholders or sources often leads to incomplete, ambiguous, and faulty requirements. There- fore, the ability to detect and repair inconsistent and incomplete require- ments is crucial to the successful modelling of requirements specifications. Ontologies provide the expressivity to sufficiently capture requirements and reasoning tasks can be performed to check the consistency and com- pleteness of the requirements model. This paper presents a Meta Model for ontology-driven goal-oriented Requirements Engineering. Ontology consistency checking and rule driven completeness tests are combined to measure the validity and coverage of the evolving requirements model. Experiences from a first evaluation are described.