Authors
Mohammad Asim. Rinky Ahuja
School of Engineering and Technology, Sushant University, Gurugram, India
Farhana Mariyam
School of Business, Sushant University, Gurugram, India
Mohammad Salman
Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Abstract

Goal-oriented methods are widely used for eliciting and analyzing software requirements. In these methods, requirements are derived from organizational goals through iterative refinement and decomposition until the responsibility of each lowest-level sub-goal is assigned to a specific agent or system. However, when stakeholders express goals in vague, contradictory, or context-dependent language, traditional goal-oriented frameworks such as KAOS and i* lack a principled mechanism for handling such ambiguity. As a result, they either require premature precision or allow uncertainty to propagate silently into the requirements specification. To address this limitation, several fuzzy logic–based approaches have been proposed to strengthen goal-oriented methods, but these approaches often depend on prior knowledge of the data set. Moreover, because decision makers may use different types of fuzzy numbers to represent ambiguity, the selection process can become highly subjective and may lead to an inappropriate requirements set, potentially causing software failure. To overcome these issues in fuzzy logic–driven goal-oriented methods, we propose a Rough-Set Approximation–based Goal-Oriented Requirements Elicitation framework. The applicability of the proposed method is demonstrated using the requirements of an Institute Examination System.

Keywords

Goal-oriented requirements elicitation Rough-set theory Uncertainty modeling Requirements prioritization Approximation spaces Software requirements engineering Institute examination system

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