Improving Requirements Engineering: An Enhanced Requirements Modelling and Analysis Method

Ryndina, Ksenia (2005) Improving Requirements Engineering: An Enhanced Requirements Modelling and Analysis Method, MSc.

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Abstract

Inadequate requirements engineering is considered to be one of the top causes of software development project failure today. One of the major problems is the lack of processes, techniques and automated tool support available to developers for specification methodology by enhancing the approach that is most popular at the moment - use case modelling. Despite their popularity, use case models lack structure and precision, which makes formal analysis of such models impossible. In our proposal, we amend traditional use case models with formal structure and semantics to make them suitable for automayed analysis. The enhanced use case modelling method that we propose is called Susan ("S"ymbolic "us"e case "an"alysis), whcih facilitates anaysis of use case models using model checking. We also developed a software tool called SusanX to construct, manipulate and analyse Susan models. The analysis feature of the tool is implemented using publicly available NuSMV model checker, which allows verification of finite state systems for behavioural properties expressed in temporal logic. A number of generic properties that can be used for verification of any Susan model are built into the SusanX tool. Additionally, SusanX permits the user to define model-specific properties for verification. This is done through property specification patterns, which allow one to express logic properties without knowing the details of the underlying formalism. In order to evaluate how valuable Susan and the SusanX tool are in solving real world problems, we performed a case study of a Cash Management System (CMS). The case study was done in collaboration with an established South African software development company, which provided use with the requirements specifications for the system. We successfully used the Susan notation to model the CMS requirements and performed various analyses on the models with SusanX. The state of requirements specifications was considerably improved through this process and numerous errors were discovered during the SusanX analyses.

Item Type:	Electronic thesis or dissertation (MSc)
Date Deposited:	02 Apr 2005
Last Modified:	10 Oct 2019 15:35
URI:	http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/201

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