The Analyst Assist project

Analyst Assist is an Alvey software engineering project whose aim was to explore ways of improving the processes of capturing and specifying requirements for information systems. The principal focus was on the communication between users and analysts, using the workstation as a medium. The main goal was to provide maximal support for relating informal statements of requirements and their rigorous specification in both directions. JSD was adopted as the foundation on which to build additional techniques. Knowledge based techniques were used in the prototype tools which have been developed to support the Analyst Assist process. A fully integrated toolset was produced which enables an analyst to go through a complete process of deriving a rigorous requirements specification from informal and unstructured statements. The application of conceptual graphs to bridge between NL and rigorous specification and the use of method knowledge in the toolset were also completed