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User guidance for creating precise and accessible property specifications

Published: 05 November 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Property specifications concisely describe aspects of what a system is supposed to do. No matter what notation is used to describe them, however, it is difficult to represent these properties correctly, since there are often subtle, but important, details that need to be considered. Propel aims to guide users through the process of creating properties that are both accessible and mathematically precise, by providing templates for commonly-occurring property patterns. These templates explicitly represent these subtle details as options. In this paper, we present a new representation of these templates, a Question Tree that asks users a hierarchical sequence of questions about their intended properties. The Question Tree representation is particularly useful for helping users select the appropriate template, but it also complements the finite-state automaton and disciplined natural language representations provided by Propel. We also report on some case studies and on an experimental evaluation of the understandability of the disciplined natural language representation.

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGSOFT '06/FSE-14: Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
November 2006
298 pages
ISBN:1595934685
DOI:10.1145/1181775
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 05 November 2006

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  • (2020)Generation of Formal Requirements from Structured Natural LanguageRequirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality10.1007/978-3-030-44429-7_2(19-35)Online publication date: 18-Mar-2020
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