A case study involving the use of Z to aid requirements specification in the software engineering course

Students often have a great deal of difficulty specifying their requirements as part of their team project in the software engineering class. Omissions, errors, and vagueness all lead to students having a much harder time in design, code, and test when these problems surface. We wanted to know whether using Z, to help teams further refine their specifications, would produce better specifications. We performed a case study of three different types of student projects, to help determine the advantages/disadvantages of using Z for requirements specification. We found certain decided advantages for some types of projects, and some significant drawbacks for others.