Towards a formal specification of revisable CORE: allowing for change

Many requirements analysis tools, techniques and methods exist to help in the development of consistent, complete and valid requirements specifications. However, few, if any, of these methods recognise and take sufficient notice of the iterative nature of eliciting and specifying requirements. The author proposes the development of revisable methods, which reflect the significance of change in evolving requirements specifications, and which would be, as a result, much more flexible than many current techniques. He considers revisable methods by describing the formal development of revisable CORE. To demonstrate its feasibility, a proof of the validity of revisable tabular collection forms is discussed in some detail. This proof also indicates the complexity of the additional rules which revisable methods demand and which makes their manual application a rather daunting prospect. To facilitate the use of revisable CORE, an automated support tool has been implemented, and this is also described