Supporting the acquisition and modeling of requirements in software design

This paper describes a system for supporting the construction of software r equirement models, which are initial computable models representing users' requirements in software design. The system principally consists of two com ponents, a system for aiding the formation of requirement concepts by visua lizing a user's thought space, and a knowledge-based system which automatic ally assembles the ascertained requirement concepts into a requirement mode l. The system extracts reusable components of a requirement model, correspo nding to the users' abstract requirement concept, from a store of similar p ast cases. The components are then automatically arranged using heuristic r easoning. By using the system, users can make their requirement concepts mo re mature, and simultaneously get computable requirement models as by-produ cts. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.