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From Object-Orientation to Formal Methods pp 58–82Cite as

Towards Posit & Prove Calculi for Requirements Engineering and Software Design

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2635))

Abstract

Some facts: Before software and computing systems can be developed, their requirements must be reasonably well understood. Before requirements can be finalised the application domain, as it is, must be fairly well understood. Some opinions: In today’s software and computing systems development very little, if anything is done, we claim, to establish fair understandings of the domain. It simply does not suffice, we further claim, to record assumptions about the domain when recording requirements. Far more radical theories of application domains must be at hand before requirements development is even attempted. In another (“earlier”) paper [6] we advocate(d) a strong rôle for domain engineering. We there argued that domain descriptions are far more stable than are requirements prescriptions for support of one or another set of domain activities. In the present paper we shall argue, that once, given extensive domain descriptions, it is comparatively faster to establish trustworthy and stable requirements than it is today. And we shall further, presently, argue that once we have a sufficient (varietal) collection of domain specific, ie. related, albeit distinct, requirements, we can develop far more reusable software components than using current approaches. In this contribution we shall thus reason, at a meta-level, about two major phases of software engineering: Requirements engineering, and software design. We shall suggest a number of requirements engineering and software design concerns, stages and steps

The paper represents work in progress. It is based on presentations of “topics for discussion” at the IFIP Working Group 2.3. Such presentations are necessarily of “work in progress” — with the aim of the presentation being to solicit comments. Hence the paper (“necessarily”) is not presenting “final” results.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), Informatics and Mathematical Modelling (IMM), Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Building 322, Richard Petersens Plads, DK–2800, Kgs.Lyngby, Denmark

    Dines Bjørner

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  1. Dines Bjørner
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway

    Olaf Owe

  2. Dept. of Informatics, Univ. of Oslo, Norway

    Stein Krogdahl

  3. Department of Informatics, University of Oslo,  

    Tom Lyche

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Bjørner, D. (2004). Towards Posit & Prove Calculi for Requirements Engineering and Software Design. In: Owe, O., Krogdahl, S., Lyche, T. (eds) From Object-Orientation to Formal Methods. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2635. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39993-3_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-39993-3_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-21366-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39993-3

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