Agenda

Novarun Deb, Università Ca' Foscari Venezia

Abstract:
We identify that the inherent sequence-agnostic property of goal models prevents requirement analysts from performing compliance checks in the requirements phase itself as compliance rules are generally embedded with temporal information. This is where we propose the Semantic Implosion Algorithm that extracts a finite state model corresponding to a given goal model with the help of model transformation. This algorithm outperforms the existing solution by a factor of 1017, making our solution more efficient and scalable for deployment in the real world. We also develop the i*ToNuSMV tool that implements the Semantic Implosion Algorithm and performs model checking on i* models. Subsequently, we go beyond structural analysis and try to explore the semantics associated with goal models and how they can be used in the goal model maintenance problem. Our final research contribution is the Annotation of Functional Semantics and their Reconciliation (AFSR) framework that provides a new goal 
 model nomenclature that goes beyond the legacy nomenclature and associates semantics with individual goals. The framework also provides a reconciliation machinery that helps to perform semantic analysis and detect entailment or consistency conflicts within goal models. The framework also provides analysts with corrective measures that can be adopted to resolve such conflicts. We also demonstrate how the goal maintenance problem can be mapped to the state space search problem and an admissible and consistent heuristic path cost function allows us to deploy A* search to find the optimal goal model configuration that is free from all conflicts.