Measuring inconsistency in requirements specifications

Abstract. In the field of requirements engineering, measuring incon-sistency is crucial to effective inconsistency management. A practical measure must consider both the degree and significance of inconsistency in specification. The main contribution of this paper is providing an ap-proach for measuring inconsistent specification in terms of the priority-based scoring vector, which integrates the measure of the degree of incon-sistency with the measure of the significance of inconsistency. In detail, for each specification ∆ that consists of a set of requirements statements, if L is a m-level priority set, we define a m-dimensional priority-based significance vector V to measure the significance of the inconsistency in ∆. Furthermore, a priority-based scoring vector SP: P(∆) → Nm+1 has been defined to provide an ordering relation over specifications that de-scribes which specification is “more essentially inconsistent than ” others.