TOOLS FOR PRODUCING FORMAL SPECIFICATIONS - A VIEW OF CURRENT ARCHITECTURES AND FUTURE-DIRECTIONS

During the last decade, one important contribution towards requirement s engineering has been the advent of formal specification languages. T hey offer a well-defined notation that can improve consistency and avo id ambiguity in specifications. However, the process of obtaining form al specifications that are consistent with the requirements is itself a difficult activity. Hence, various researchers are developing system s that aid the transition from informal to formal specifications. The kind of problems tackled and the contributions made by these proposed systems are very diverse. This paper brings these studies together to provide a vision for future architectures that aim to aid the transiti on from informal to formal specifications. The new architecture, which is based on the strengths of existing studies, tackles a number of ke y issues in requirements engineering such as identifying ambiguities, incompleteness, and reusability. The paper concludes with a discussion of the research problems that need to be addressed in order to realis e the proposed architecture.