A Textual Domain Specific Language for Requirement Modelling

Oyindamola Olajubu

Conference: 10th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, At Bergamo Italy

Abstract:

Requirement specification is usually done with a combination of Natural Language (NL) and informal diagrams. Modelling approaches to support requirement engineering activities have involved a combination of text and graphical models. In this work, a textual domain specific modelling notation for requirement specification is presented. How certain requirement attributes are addressed using this notation is also described.

Paper is available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281372036_A_Textual_Domain_Specific_Language_for_Requirement_Modelling

Oyindamola Olajubu is a PhD student within the Department of Computing and Immersive Technologies, University of Northampton, UK and co-supervised with GE Avation. 

Northampton Supervisors:

Dr Suraj Ajit

Dr Mark Johnsom

Dr Scott Turner

If you'd like to find out more about Computing at the University of Northampton go to: www.computing.northampton.ac.uk. All views and opinions are the author's and do not necessarily reflected those of any organisation they are associated with

Model-Based Development (MBD)

Welcome to Oyindamola Olajubu who has recently joined the Department of Computing and Immersive Technology, University of Northampton as a PhD researcher on a collaborative project  with GE Aviation Systems on Model-Based software development. A summary of the project can be found below.

Project Description

Model-Based Development (MBD) is seeing widespread adoption in a variety of domains within industry, especially in aviation. Industries around the world are reporting significant benefits from its use. However, the extent to which MBD can be used effectively in the software development lifecycle is unclear.

GE Aviation Systems primarily uses natural language (textual ‘shall’ statements) to express software requirements. These textual statements are often ambiguous, untestable, incorrect, missing detail, etc. Finding this out late in the development lifecycle proves very expensive. To this end, GE Aviation Systems has turned to MBD. They still use textual statements to express software requirements, but they supplement the requirements writing activity with modelling and simulation so that engineers gain a better understanding of the requirements and their faults. The models can then be refined and improved and serve as the Software Design artifacts that are used to auto-generate code. Currently, this means they have to write tests manually to test the design against the requirements. The study will investigate whether they could use models to express requirements and use those models to auto-generate test cases for testing the design model. This would then increase their productivity. To summarise, the research project will study the feasibility of model based tool support to capture requirements and automate requirements based testing.

Supervisors
Dr Suraj Ajit
Dr Mark Johnson
Dr Scott Turner