Reasoning on requirement specifications: a deductive approach

The requirement specification activity is one of the most error-prone and expensive in the software development life cycle. It is also a complex activity because of the fuzzy and informal nature of the user requirements, the lack of automated tools to support it, and the requirements evolution. A deductive approach is presented. It deals with some fundamental AI issues regarding the knowledge acquisition process-in particular, the way informal requirement descriptions evolve into formal ones. To show how the approach can be applied, a fragment of a patient monitoring system is specified in the top-down decomposition technique. The approach is implemented in a requirement specification tool, SMES (software modeling expert system)