An Ontological Approach to Predict Trade-Offs between Security and Usability for Mobile Application Requirements Engineering
Woori Roh, Seok-Won Lee · 2017
Solving conflicts among quality attribute requirements during the software engineering (SE) process is a complicated task. Due to their opposing characteristics, conflicts between security and usability frequently arise. However, there is a lack of research in terms of a consensus on the semantics of quality attributes, especially for security and usability, as well as the study of elim-inating or reducing the trade-offs and conflicts during the re-quirements engineering (RE) process. Therefore, we propose a novel approach to predict the conflicts between security and usability in the RE process. For this study, we construct a three-layer ontological knowledge base of security and usability. By using the proposed ontological knowledge base, we can figure out the relation between security and usability. We can discover which quality attributes cause conflicts in the RE process. We applied two case studies to validate the results which show that the proposed approach can derive more than twice as many trade-offs between security and usability compared to the num-ber of trade-offs derived by graduate students who are major in SE and computer engineering.