Abstract

Most software engineers agree that in a software project problems should be identified, requirements should be elicited, and the target system should be specified before implementation begins.

Requirements documents may be written in more or less formal notations. The main notation used in industrial software projects is natural language. This likely causes problems because requirements expressed in natural language are often imprecise, ambiguous, or inconsistent. That is why some approaches propose the use of semi-formal or formal notations. However, an investigation carried out by the author shows that a change to more formal notations is not possible in many typical project environments.

In this work the ADMIRE approach is presented, a requirements engineering approach which is primarily based on natural language. The aim of ADMIRE is to improve the requirements engineering process, especially the writing, management, validation, and verification of requirements documents.

The main results of this work are an information model, a process model, a set of validation and verification procedures, and a tool.

The information model describes information types and relations relevant to natural language specifications. Because defects cannot always be avoided or solved immediately in requirements processes, the information model allows that some desirable properties are currently not met and offers the possibility to document these defects.

The process model describes, suited to the information model, an exemplary dividing of the requirements process into phases and activities.

For each desirable property of the information model, a set of visual and automatic procedures for validation and verification is introduced. These procedures verify both structural constraints and the contents of the natural language texts.

The tool manages instances of the information model, supports the activities of the process model, and implements the validation and verification procedures.

The ADMIRE approach has been validated by writing an extensive specification document.