Information Quality (IQ) is a key success factor for the efficient performance of any organization. Despite this, most Requirements Engineering frameworks either ignore or loosely define IQ requirements. To this end, we propose a novel conceptual framework for modeling and analyzing IQ requirements of the system-to-be. The importance of IQ for organizations is out of discussion, and several solutions for dealing with IQ needs have been proposed in the literature (e.g., integrity constraints, etc.). However, most of these solutions mainly focus on the technical aspects of IQ, and they do not solve problems that may rise at organizational or social levels. More specifically, these techniques do not satisfy the needs of current complex systems, such as socio-technical systems, where humans and organizations are integral part of the system along with the technical components (e.g., smart cities, etc.). At the other hand, we have several Requirements Engineering (RE) approaches that are able to capture the organizational along with the social needs of the system-to-be (e.g., secure Tropos [1], etc.), but their main focus is on the functionality of the system, and they either ignore or loosely define IQ needs. To tackle this problem, we propose a RE framework that is based on secure Tropos and extends it with concepts for capturing IQ requirements. Secure Tropos [1] introduces concepts for modeling actors along with their objectives, entitlements and capabilities. However, it does not provide concepts for capturing IQ needs. Thus, we extended its conceptual model with the following concepts to model and analyze IQ requirements1: (1) Goal-information relations: we provide more refined concepts to capture goals/ information relations, namely: produces, optional read, required read, and sends; (2) Information accuracy: we provide trusted production/ trusted provision concepts to analyze accuracy. For example, information is accurate for read, if it is produced by trusted actor (it will not produce falsified/ fraud information), and 1 For more information about the concepts/formal framework, you can refer to [2,3]
it has been transferred through trusted provision (it will not be intentionally/
unintentionally modified during its transfer). While sender cares only about the
trusted provision to analyze the accuracy of its information; (
Our framework is supported by a CASE tool (ST-IQ tool)2 that consists of 3
main parts: (
We are working on extending the framework to be able to derive the final IQ specifications from the requirements model in terms of IQ policies that define the permitted, forbidden and obligated actors’ activities toward information. Moreover, we aim to enrich the trust analysis among actors concerning IQ by relaying on beliefs related to their internal structure (capabilities and intentions). 2 http://mohamadgharib.wordpress.com/ 3 http://www.dlvsystem.com/dlv/