TELECOMMUNICATIONS SERVICE DEVELOPMENT - A DESIGN METHODOLOGY AND ITSINTELLIGENT SUPPORT

This paper describes a development life cycle for telecommunications s ervices, emphasizing requirements capture, formal specification and va lidation. The service is developed along the three dimensions of the m ethodology: refinement, completeness and formality, aiming for a compl ete, consistent and formally specified service definition. The describ ed methodology can be integrated into currently existing development l ife cycles which employ formal methods for service creation. Active su pport for the proposed life cycle is provided by a novel expert system called Requirements Assistant for Telecommunications Services (RATS), currently under development. It actively helps during requirements ac quisition and early analysis, and encourages specification reuse with the help of a semi-automated negotiation process. The RATS tool advise s the service developer during all stages of the service development, and on different levels of abstraction, and provides requirements mana gement facilities, like traceability, impact analysis and document gen eration. Some of the features are illustrated using examples from the Universal Personal Telecommunication (UPT) service. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.