The analysis and management of non-canonical requirement specifications through a belief integration game

Non-canonical requirement specifications refer to a set of software requirements that is either inconsistent, vague or incomplete. In this paper, we provide a correspondence between requirement specifications and annotated propositional belief bases. Through this analogy, we are able to analyze the contents of a given set of requirement collections known as viewpoints and specify whether they are incomplete, incoherent, or inconsistent under a closed-world reasoning assumption. Based on the requirement collections’ properties introduced in this paper, we define a viewpoint integration game through which the inconsistencies of non-canonical requirement specifications are resolved. The game consists of several rounds of negotiation and is performed by two main functions, namely choice and enhancement functions. The outcome of this game is a set of inconsistency-free requirement collections that can be integrated to form a unique fair representative of the given requirement collections.