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. / School of Computing / D. Phil (Computer Science)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:unisa/oai:uir.unisa.ac.za:10500/23395 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Dongmo, Cyrille |
| Contributors | Van der Poll, John Andrew |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | 1 online resource (xx, 313 leaves) : Illustration |
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