Impact analysis of design alternatives on imprecise requirements

The objective of software design is to build a system that meets the customer's requirements. Often requirements can be achieved by a set of different design alternatives. Identifying the impacts of various design alternatives on requirements thus become very important. In this paper, we proposed a formal framework to identify and reason impacts of design alternatives on imprecise requirements. Our approach captures the elasticity of imprecise requirements using fuzzy logic and represents design alternatives directly based on the representation of requirements. Based on these representations, we can: (1) identify relationships between requirements and between design alternatives; (2) reason implicit impacts of the design alternatives on requirements based on the identified requirement-requirement relationships, and design-requirement relationships; and (3) facilitate capture of the design rationale. The goal of identifying the impacts of design alternatives on requirements is to guide design engineers in evaluating design alternatives, to reduce design errors, to facilitate design rationale capture, and to build a system that better satisfies the customer.