Formalising non-functional requirements embedded in user requirements notation (URN) models

Abstract

The growing need for computer software in different sectors of activity, (health, agriculture, industries, education, aeronautic, science and telecommunication) together with the increasing reliance of the society as a whole on information technology, is placing a heavy and fast growing demand on complex and high quality software systems. In this regard, the anticipation has been on non-functional requirements (NFRs) engineering and formal methods. Despite their common objective, these techniques have in most cases evolved separately. NFRs engineering proceeds firstly, by deriving measures to evaluate the quality of the constructed software (product-oriented approach), and secondarily by improving the engineering process (process-oriented approach). With the ability to combine the analysis of both functional and non-functional requirements, Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) approaches have become de facto leading requirements engineering methods. They propose through refinement/operationalisation, means to satisfy NFRs encoded in softgoals at an early phase of software development. On the other side, formal methods have kept, so far, their promise to eliminate errors in software artefacts to produce high quality software products and are therefore particularly solicited for safety and mission critical systems for which a single error may cause great loss including human life. This thesis introduces the concept of Complementary Non-functional action (CNF-action) to extend the analysis and development of NFRs beyond the traditional goals/softgoals analysis, based on refinement/operationalisation, and to propagate the influence of NFRs to other software construction phases. Mechanisms are also developed to integrate the formal technique Z/Object-Z into the standardised User Requirements Notation (URN) to formalise GRL models describing functional and non-functional requirements, to propagate CNF-actions of the formalised NFRs to UCMs maps, to facilitate URN construction process and the quality of URN models.