An agile approach to requirements specification
Philip Barry, Peggy S. Brouse · 1999
This dissertation develops a new paradigm for reusing existing software artifacts to more rapidly and more completely develop system specifications from user requirements. Better system specifications serve to provide an improved foundation for system development and testing. The technical approach discussed herein relies on using existing software artifacts to create a library of reusable fragments from which differing perspectives of domain can be built. These perspectives model the system requirements that are indicated if a user requests specific functionality. System Requirement Webs (SRWs) are introduced as the knowledge construct that relates domain specific system requirements through an associative operator called weak implication. A number of computational agents are instantiated with differing viewpoints and collectively act to decide the significance of user requirements. The agents modify the SRW and observe the results, passing results between them to develop a snapshot of the implied systems requirements. This concept has been successfully implemented in the BOSH prototype that uses a Bayesian Network to simulate the SRW and a Java implementation of the CLIPS expert system to instantiate the agents. A case study is presented which develops the technical specification for a management tool for a federation of distributed simulations. Building on promising results from the case study, future directions for this research are suggested.