Applying PageRank Algorithm in Requirement Concern Impact Analysis

As an important part of requirement management, managing requirement change plays a key role in controlling project schedule and costs at early stage. Effective requirement impact analysis would give proper assessment on the effect of certain requirement changes on the whole system, and provide useful information for making trade-off decisions on future system design and implementation. In this paper a quantitative approach to concern impact analysis at requirement level has been proposed with the application of PageRank algorithm, which is a successful link based Web page sorting algorithm. At first, separation of concerns is applied during deriving formal requirement specification from textual requirement statements. Next, concerns are specified and concern relationship graph is established. Finally, PageRank algorithm is utilized on concern relationship graph for assessing the impact of concern changes. Our approach has been applied to hallway section in light control system and validation of analysis result has been stated.