A Case Study in Systematic Improvement of Language for Requirements

The challenges to requirements from linguistic factors are well-known. This work concerns an approach to communicating requirements with greater fidelity among stakeholders through accommodation of cognitive habits and limits. To instantiate this approach, we synthesized linguistic principles into a method to generate high-quality representations of domain concepts to form the base of a project lexicon. The representations are further organized into a knowledge base that records relationships of interest. We hypothesize that the method leads to representations free of certain faults that compromise communicative fidelity. To investigate, we executed a case study in which the method was applied to the domain semantics of a medical device. Our representations compared favorably to pre-existing versions; further, analysis of the artifact as a whole supported new assertions about the application domain. These results indicate that particular language issues can be systematically managed, and that new information is available in the process