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Explaining Decisions

Explanations of decisions are central to decision governance: before changing how decisions are made, you need to explain how they are made; you need to explain why they need to be changed; and, you need to explain how changes that governance brings should lead to better decisions. So the question is: What is a good…

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What Is a High Quality Decision?

Is it one that led to the best outcome? Or one that integrates all the relevant and available information? Maybe one that is liked by a majority? If decision governance is followed to the letter, will that guarantee a high quality decision?  The quality of a decision depends on the following: The reason a decision…

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What Is the Depth of Expertise of an AI Training Dataset?

I use “depth of expertise” as a data quality dimension of AI training datasets. It describes how much a dataset reflects of expertise in a knowledge domain. This is not a common data quality dimension used in other contexts, and I haven’t seen it as such in discussions of, say, quality of data used for…

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Why Specialized AI Should Be Certified by Expert Communities

Should the explanations that an Artificial Intelligence system provides for its recommendations, or decisions, meet a higher standard than explanations for the same, that a human expert would be able to provide? I wrote separately, here, about conditions that good explanations need to satisfy. These conditions are very hard to satisfy, and in particular the…

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Data Authenticity, Accuracy, Objectivity, and Diversity Requirements in Generative AI

In April 2023, the Cyberspace Administration of China released a draft Regulation for Generative Artificial Intelligence Services. The note below continues the previous one related to the same regulation, here.  One of the requirements on Generative AI is that the authenticity, accuracy, objectivity, and diversity of the data can be guaranteed.  My intent below is…

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Requirements Satisfaction ≠ Customer Satisfaction

There is engineering quality of a product or service, which is fitness to the specification, and there is perceived quality, or subjective quality, which is proportional to the distance between expectations and experience of the person asked. What is the relationship between these, between specification, requirements, expectations, and experience? This is a longstanding question in…

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Normative Management of Web Service Level Agreements

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used in Service- Oriented Computing to define the obligations of the parties involved in a transaction. SLAs define these obligations, including for instance the expected service levels to be delivered by the provider, and the payment expected from the client. The obligations of the parties must be made explicit prior…

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Timing Nonfunctional Requirements

Analysis of temporal properties of nonfunctional – i.e., quality – requirements (NFRs) has not received significant attention. In response, this paper introduces basic concepts and techniques needed for the specification and analysis of time properties of NFRs. Jureta, I.J. and Faulkner, S., 2008, October. Timing Nonfunctional Requirements. In International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (pp. 302-311). Springer, Berlin,…

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Context-Driven Autonomic Adaptation of Service Level Agreements

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are used in Service-Oriented Computing to define the obligations of the parties involved in a transaction. SLAs define the service users’ Quality of Service (QoS) requirements that the service provider should satisfy. Requirements defined once may not be satisfiable when the context of the web services changes (e.g., when requirements or…

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Clarifying Goal Models

Representation and reasoning about information system (IS) requirements is facilitated with the use of goal models to describe the desired and undesired IS behaviors. One difficulty in goal modeling is arriving at a shared understanding of a goal model instance, mainly due to different backgrounds of the system stakeholders who participate in modeling, and the…

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Achieving, Satisficing, and Excelling

Definitions of the concepts derived from the goal concept (including functional and nonfunctional goal, hardgoal, and softgoal) used in requirements engineering are discussed, and precise (and, when appropriate, mathematical) definitions are suggested. The concept of satisficing, associated to softgoals is revisited. A softgoal is satisficed when thresholds of some precise criteria are reached. Satisficing does…

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A More Expressive Softgoal Conceptualization for Quality Requirements Analysis

Initial software quality requirements tend to be imprecise, subjective, idealistic, and context-specific. An extended characterization of the common Softgoal concept is proposed for representing and reasoning about such requirements during the early stages of the requirements engineering process. The types of information often implicitly contained in a Softgoal instance are highlighted to allow richer requirements…