Requirements and Specification Exemplars

  • Authors:

  • Martin S. Feather;Stephen Fickas;Anthony Finkelsteiin;Axel Van Lamsweerde

  • Affiliations:

  • Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena. E-mail: feather@jpl.nasa.gov;Computer Science Department, University of Oregon. E-mail: fickas@cs.uoregon.edu;Department of Computer Science, City University. E-mail: acwf@cs.city.ac.uk;Département d‘Ingénierie Informatique, Université Catholique de Louvain. E-mail: avl@info.ucl.ac.be

  • Venue:
  • Automated Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 1997

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Abstract

Specification exemplars are familiar to most software engineeringresearchers. For instance, many will have encountered the well knownlibrary and lift problem statements, and will have seen one or morepublished specifications. Exemplars may serve several purposes: todrive and communicate individual research advances; to establishresearch agendas and to compare and contrast alternative approaches;and, ultimately, to lead to advances in software developmentpractices.Because of their prevalence in the literature, exemplars are worthcritical study. In this paper we consider the purposes that exemplarsmay serve, and explore the incompatibilities inherent in trying toserve several of them at once. Researchers should therefore be clearabout what successfully handling an exemplar demonstrates. We go onto examine the use of exemplars not only for writing specifications(an end product of requirements engineering), but also for therequirements engineering process itself. In particular, requirementsfor good requirements exemplars are suggested and ways of obtainingsuch exemplars are discussed.