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I hope to produce a more detailed site indicative of my training in Computer Science in the near future.
Click here to view my paper on the Semantic-Neural Method
Click here to view my
paper on the Requirements Hierarchy Approach [password is needed]
Research wins National Award!
Click to read the article
The following is a synopsis of the Requirements Hierarchy Approach
Paper:
Requirements drive any systems engineering effort. Most of the focus,
when it comes to this effort, has been placed in the area of functional
requirements. According to Alford, "In nearly every software project
which fails to meet performance and cost goals, requirements inadequacies
play a major and expensive role in project failure"[Alfo]. Although
written "requirements inadequacies" it should read "functional
requirements inadequacies." There has been a tremendous amount of money
and effort to solve this issue. With the emphasis on functional
requirements, it is hard to understand why systems engineers still
struggle to create a complete set of requirements for a stakeholder. One
reason for this has been the inattention to non-functional requirements
(NFRs) and the affect they can have on fulfilling functional
requirements. This is most notable in the omission of non-functional
requirements by the two documents which are considered the guidelines for
the Engineering of Systems in the United States: Electronics Industry
Association (EIA) 632 and the International Standards Organization
(ISO) 15228. The choice of this topic is a small step in an attempt to
give non-functional requirements a more prominent role in the field of
systems engineering.
Non-functional requirements are commonly called the qualitative aspects of
a system -- testability, mobility, and scalability, to name a
few. However, when taking a holistic view of a system, non-functional
requirements take on a quantitative nature. This paper will describe the
Requirements Hierarchy Approach (RHA), a quantifiable method to measure
and manipulate the affect non-functional requirements have on a system by
capturing the utility of functional requirements. Through the use of
agent-oriented programming, multi-attribute utility analysis (MAUA), and
decision science theory, non-functional attributes (of a system) can be
used as containers in an attempt to capture the broadest cross-section of
functional requirements, based on stakeholder input. The final result
will be an optimal set of requirements that satisfy the stakeholder's
needs and are not in opposition to one another.
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