ACoRe: Automated Goal-Conflict Resolution

Resumen

Conference: 26th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE), Paris, France, April 22-27, 2023.https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.05213.pdf

System goals are the statements that, in the context of software requirements specification, capture how the software should behave. Many times, the under- standing of stakeholders on what the system should do, as captured in the goals, can lead to different problems, from clearly contradicting goals, to more subtle situations in which the satisfaction of some goals inhibits the satisfaction of oth- ers. These latter issues, called goal divergences, are the subject of goal conflict analysis, which consists of identifying, assessing, and resolving divergences, as part of a more general activity known as goal refinement.

While there exist techniques that, when requirements are expressed formally, can automatically identify and assess goal conflicts, there is currently no au- tomated approach to support engineers in resolving identified divergences. In this paper, we present ACoRe, the first approach that automatically proposes potential resolutions to goal conflicts, in requirements specifications formally captured using linear-time temporal logic. ACoRe systematically explores syn- tactic modifications of the conflicting specifications, aiming at obtaining res- olutions that disable previously identified conflicts, while preserving specifica- tion consistency. ACoRe integrates modern multi-objective search algorithms (in particular, NSGA-III, WBGA, and AMOSA) to produce resolutions that maintain coherence with the original conflicting specification, by searching for specifications that are either syntactically or semantically similar to the original specification.

We assess ACoRe on 25 requirements specifications taken from the litera- ture. We show that ACoRe can successfully produce various conflict resolutions for each of the analyzed case studies, including resolutions that resemble speci- fication repairs manually provided as part of conflict analyses.