Automated RE Tools

10/19/13

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Automated Requirements Analysis Tools

(Member of co-investigators)

Formal method is one of the major candidate approaches to developing ultra-high integrity software. However, there are difficulties to apply formal methods to practical software development. One of the difficulties is the development of a formal specification of large and complicated software that represents what the user requires. On the other hand, requirement engineering methodology and technology have been advanced to solve problems in requirements acquisition, analysis and specification. However, few researches in this area have targeted on developing formal specifications. There is a wide gap between requirements engineering and formal methods.

Since 1995, researches have been carried out to take a software automation approach to attacking this problem with the target of developing practical method and automated tools to support requirements analysis and the generation of correct formal specification based on current requirements engineering methodology. A prototype tool has been implemented on Sun Workstations, which has the following main functions.

  • Support of the scenario driven requirements acquisition and analysis by automatic check of consistency and completeness between scenarios;

  • Support of requirements model construction by automatic synthesis of requirements models from scenarios and check of the consistency between scenarios and requirements models;

  • Support of the multiple view approach to requirements analysis by automatic check of the consistency between requirements models;

  • Support of domain knowledge acquisition by automatic generation frameworks of dictionaries from requirements models;

  • Support of formal specification of requirements by automatic generation of formal specifications in Z;

  • Support of requirements validation by automatic generation of test cases, measurement of test adequacy, and automatic check of consistency between test scenarios and requirements models;

These functions are integrated into one environment according to a progressive process model of requirements engineering. The basic idea is to divide the whole requirements engineering process into a sequence of phases. Each phase improves the formality of the description of user's requirements by a small step and each step is accomplished by collaboration between the user and the automatic tools. In each step, the tool automatically checks the correctness of the result.

Related Publications

    Zhu, H. and Jin, L., Scenario analysis in an automated tool for requirements engineering, the Journal of Requirements Engineering, Vol. 5, No. 1, pp2-22, April 2000.

    Zhu, H. and Jin, L., Automating scenario driven structured requirements engineering, Proc. of COMPSAC'2000, Taipei, Taiwan,pp311-318, Oct. 2000.

    Luqi, Chang, C.K., and Zhu, H., Specifications in software prototyping, Journal of Systems and Software, Vol.42, No. 2, pp125~140, Aug. 1998.

    Jin, L. and Zhu, H., Description and Analysis of Use Scenarios in Requirements Engineering, Proc. of SEKE’98, San Fransisco, USA, June 18-20, 1998. Pp18~25.

    Jin, L., Zhu, H., et al., A use scenario driven approach to automatic generation of software requirements models, Chinese Journal of Computers, Vol. 21, No. 8, pp673~681, Aug. 1998. (In Chinese).

    Zhu Y., Jin, L. and Zhu, H., A note on software safety requirements analysis and architectural design of hospital information management systems, Computer Systems and Applications, No. 8, Vol. 1998, pp2~5. (In Chinese)

    Jin, L. and Zhu, H., Automatic generation of formal specification from requirments definition, Proc. of IEEE 1st International Conference on Formal Engineering Methods, Nov. 1997, Hiroshima, Japan, pp243-251.

    Xu, J., Jin, L., and Zhu, H., Tool support of orderly transition from informal to formal descriptions in requirements engineering, Proc. of IFIP'96 : Advanced IT Tools, Australia, Eds. Nobuyoshi Terashima and Edward Altman, Chapman & Hall, Spet. 1996, pp199~206.

    Xu, J. and Zhu, H., Requirements analysis and specification as a problem of software automation -- Some researches on requirements analysis, Proc. SEKE'96, Nevada, USA, June 1996, pp457~464.

    Dong, L., Zhu, H., Jin, L. and Xu, J., On the design of the software requirements analysis support system NDRASS, Chinese Journal of Advanced Software Research, Vol. 3, 1996, pp1-6, (In Chinese).

    Xu, J., Zhu, H., et al., From requirements definition to formal functional specification -- A transformational approach, Science in China, Supp. Vol. 38, Sept. 1995.

    Zhang, C. L., Bei, G. H., Huo, Q. L., Jin, L., and Zhu, H., Algorithms for scenario driven requirements analysis support tools—automatic consistency and completeness check and requirements model synthesis, Journal of Computer Research and Development, In press. (In Chinese).

    Huo, Q. L., Zhang, C. L., Bei, G. H., Jin, L., and Zhu, H., A methodology of scenario driven software requirements analysis, Journal of Computer Science, In press. (In Chinese).

 

 
 

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