Requirement Evolution Management: A Systematic Approach

Evolution of requirements is a natural phenomenon in the development life cycle of both software and hardware systems. As requirements evolve, new features are added and existing features are modified or deleted. To conform to the requirement evolution, the current working version of the implementation also has to change in most cases, to support the changed needs. In this paper, we propose an automated approach for analyzing and debugging requirement evolutions. Given two requirements (a reference one and a new, modified one) and a design implementation that conforms to the earlier requirement, our approach uses symbolic specification comparison and unfolding to extract the unsupported requirement core. In addition, to aid the programmer, our method also synthesizes a set of scenarios that may aid the developer address the changed requirements.