Inferring Declarative Requirements Specifications from Operational Scenarios

—Scenarios are increasingly recognized as an effective means for eliciting, validating, and documenting software requirements. This paper concentrates on the use of scenarios for requirements elicitation and explores the process of inferring formal specifications of goals and requirements from scenario descriptions. Scenarios are considered here as typical examples of system usage; they are provided in terms of sequences of interaction steps between the intended software and its environment. Such scenarios are in general partial, procedural, and leave required properties about the intended system implicit. In the end such properties need to be stated in explicit, declarative terms for consistency/completeness analysis to be carried out. A formal method is proposed for supporting the process of inferring specifications of system goals and requirements inductively from interaction scenarios provided by stakeholders. The method is based on a learning algorithm that takes scenarios as ex...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 1998
• Where: TSE
• Authors: Axel van Lamsweerde, Laurent Willemet
• Keywords: Requirements, Scenarios, Specifications, TSE 1998