Abstract
In software engineering, system requirements are written in a natural language such as English. Later in the design phase, these requirements are usually translated to a semi-formal language such as UML. This design model gives support to the development of the system in a programming language. Although natural language is easy to use, it is intrinsically ambiguous. Undesired effects may arise, as the errors generated by misinterpretation of the requirements can lead to a late discovery of a problem with a costly solution. In this paper, we propose the use of a Controlled Natural Language (CNL) (a subset of English that obeys a formal grammar) as a language for writing requirements. Moreover, we developed a translator from a CNL to the modelling language of the NuSMV model checker. In addition, we propose another CNL to describe properties in the style of a temporal logic. A second translator transforms this CNL into Computation Tree Logic. Therefore, our toolset allows the user to benefit from the user-friendliness of a natural language and to perform a formal analysis on the requirements using the NuSMV model checker. We are thus able to assert whether the requirements satisfy a property. The user only deals with CNLs as we hide all formal languages involved in the inputs of a model checker. Counter-examples are produced in the NuSMV notation, but they are fairly intuitive to understand. We illustrate our work in a case study.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by the National Institute of Science and Technology for Software Engineering (INES), funded by CNPq and FACEPE, grants 573964/2008-4, 560256/2010-8 and APQ-1037-1.03/08.
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Barza, S., Carvalho, G., Iyoda, J., Sampaio, A., Mota, A., Barros, F. (2016). Model Checking Requirements. In: Ribeiro, L., Lecomte, T. (eds) Formal Methods: Foundations and Applications. SBMF 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10090. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-49815-7_13
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