CS2125 Paper Review Form - Winter 2018

Reviewer: Ramy Shahin

Paper Title: Detection of Conflicting Functional Requirements in a Use Case-Driven Approach

Author(s): Jan Hendrik Hausmann, Reiko Heckel, Gabi Taentzer

1) Is the paper technically correct?
 [*] Yes
 [ ] Mostly (minor flaws, but mostly solid)
 [ ] No

2) Originality
 [ ] Very good (very novel, trailblazing work)
 [*] Good 
 [ ] Marginal (very incremental)
 [ ] Poor (little or nothing that is new)

3) Technical Depth
 [ ] Very good (comparable to best conference papers)
 [*] Good (comparable to typical conference papers)
 [ ] Marginal depth
 [ ] Little or no depth

4) Impact/Significance
 [ ] Very significant
 [*] Significant
 [ ] Marginal significance.
 [ ] Little or no significance.

5) Presentation
 [ ] Very well written
 [ ] Generally well written
 [*] Readable
 [ ] Needs considerable work
 [ ] Unacceptably bad

6) Overall Rating
 [ ] Strong accept (award quality)
 [*] Accept (high quality - would argue for acceptance)
 [ ] Weak Accept (borderline, but lean towards acceptance)
 [ ] Weak Reject (not sure why this paper was published)


7) Summary of the paper's main contribution and rationale
   for your recommendation. (1-2 paragraphs)

The paper is addressing the problem of detecting conflicts and dependencies between different activities in a UML Use Case model. Conflicts arise when activities due to different actors (stakeholders) result in inconsistencies in the structural model, and dependencies arise when one activity is causally dependent on another. Detecting both conflicts and dependencies is essential in finding overall system inconsistencies during the requirements analysis phase.
The approach presented relies on modeling activities in terms of their functional preconditions and postconditions, both represented as object graphs. An activity is thus modeled as a graph transformation from a pre-state to a post-state. Two transformations (activities) are in conflict if they are not parallelly independent, and dependent if they are not sequentially independent. Parallel and sequential independence are both checked using standard graph transformation techniques. 


8) List 1-3 strengths of the paper.  (1-2 sentences each,
identified as S1, S2, S3.)

S1 – The paper applies established techniques from graph rewriting to UML models (which are graphical representations) in a straightforward way. 
S2 – Modeling activity pre- and post-conditions graphically is more convenient to engineers, compared to using textual languages.
S3 – Integrating the technique into the AGG tool is clearly presented in the paper.


9) List 1-3 weaknesses of the paper (1-2 sentences each,
identified as W1, W2, W3.)
W1 – The paper uses a small UML model as a running example, and doesn’t evaluate the technique/tool on s more realistic system.
W2 – Use Case relationships (e.g. inheritance) are not taken into consideration in the analysis.
W3 – Rich constraints (structural and/or OCL constraints) are not taken into consideration either.