Software requirements validation via task analysis
Journal of Systems and Software
Automating Scenario-Driven Structured Requirements Engineering
COMPSAC '00 24th International Computer Software and Applications Conference
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The validation of software requirements is widely perceived as of vital importance in software development. To facilitate static testing of requirements definitions, this paper proposes a method for generating detailed descriptions of software behaviour in the form of activity lists inspired by HCI''s approach to task analysis. An activity list is a prose description of the behaviour of a system. It is generated from a scenario of the operation of the system. It puts together all the information scattered over the requirements document, filters out information irrelevant to the scenario and presents the behaviour as a linear sequence of events in temporal order. Activity lists are more comprehensible and testable than two-dimensional multiple diagram models of software requirements. The paper presents the transformation rules, algorithms and a prototype tool for generating activity lists from requirements models represented by data flow diagrams, state transition diagrams, entity relationship diagrams and their associated dictionaries. A complete example is presented to illustrate the use of the method.