Assessing the maturity of requirements through argumentation: A good enough approach

Requirements engineers need to be confident that enough requirements analysis has been done before a project can move forward. In the context of KAOS, this information can be derived from the soundness of the refinements: sound refinements indicate that the requirements in the goal-graph are mature enough or good enough for implementation. We can estimate how close we are to `good enough´ requirements using the judgments of experts and other data from the goals. We apply Toulmin´s model of argumentation to evaluate how sound refinements are. We then implement the resulting argumentation model using Bayesian Belief Networks and provide a semi-automated way aided by Natural Language Processing techniques to carry out the proposed evaluation. We have performed an initial validation on our work using a small case-study involving an electronic document management system.