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Composing multi-perspective software requirements specifications

Abstract:

One of the main needs when dealing with multi-perspective specifications is to be able to have at our disposal, at intermediate stages of the development process, a merged view which properly reflects the knowledge of each participant in the elicitation tasks (and over which we can reason, even in the presence of disagreement and incompleteness). We show in this paper to what extent there can be many merged models, having all of them useful application. So there is not a unique operator which can be qualified as the best; on the contrary, there will be a suitable merging operator depending on the goal of the merging process. More concretely, we will propose a set of four composition operators: ∐max, ∐min, ∐maj and ∐maj+inc. They will be evaluated making use of a list of desired algebraic properties proposed by researchers on merging and which should be held by an ideal merging operator. This analysis can help us to compare the different operators, revealing the key features of each, and identifying weaknesses that may require further research. The conclusion drawn after this analysis points out that these properties are not useful enough to adequately characterize a merging operator. Therefore, new properties will be provided in order to complete the previous list and help to define better the behavior of the different merging operators. © 2008 World Scientific Publishing Company.