Tools for Constructing Requirements Specification: The SCR Toolset at the Age of Ten

Abstract

While human effort is critical to creating requirements specifications and human inspection can detect many specification errors, software tools find errors inspections miss and also find certain classes of errors more cheaply. This paper describes a set of tools for constructing and analyzing requirements specifications in the SCR (Software Cost Reduction) tabular notation. The tools include a specification editor, a consistency checker, a simulator, and tools for verifying application properties including a model checker, a verifier, a property checker based on decision procedures, and an invariant generator. The paper also describes the practical systems to which the tools are being applied as well as some new tools recently added to the toolset, e.g. a tool that constructs a sound and complete abstraction from a property and a specification. To illustrate the tools, the paper describes their use in developing a requirements specification for an automobile cruise control system.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2005
Accession Number
ADA465422

Entities

People

  • Constance Heitmeyer
  • Myla M. Archer
  • Ralph Jeffords
  • Ramesh Bharadwaj

Organizations

  • United States Naval Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • C4I
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Engineered Resilient Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Automata
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Consistency
  • Control Systems
  • Engineering
  • Language
  • Programming Languages
  • Simulations
  • Simulators
  • Software Development
  • Specifications
  • Standards
  • Systems Science
  • Test Methods

Fields of Study

  • Computer science
  • Engineering

Readers

  • Database Systems and Applications
  • Educational Psychology
  • Software Engineering.