Automating the Requirement Analysis

Abstract

Very frequently, the failure of building a good information systems is rooted in the traditional methodology of application software development. One of the most important and problematical parts in the development process is specifying and analyzing users ‘requirements. Errors made at this stage are extremely expensive to correct when they are discovered during program testing or during system working. The problems that occur in requirement specifications are due to the unclear system requirements largely caused by the communication gap, which exists between experts in the particular application domain and the software developers. The reason of the communication gap is that the domain experts are not familiar with the technology and terminology used by the software developers and vice versa. In order to tackle these problems, many studies on formal specification languages have been done for making requirement specification precise and consistent, thus avoiding the ambiguous and inconsistent characteristics of natural language specification. But formal specification languages do not solve all the problems of requirement specifications. One of their major drawbacks is that the domain experts often find them difficult to understand and learn, even software developers find them difficult to use.