Abstract
Among the software engineering development phases, requirements engineering is the one that has the most impact on project success or failure. To be executed in various contexts, there is an important need for flexibility and efficient tool support. A flexible requirements engineering method should include several levels allowing for more or less completeness and precision. Some project contexts would need a lightweight activity using structured natural language but still being guided and grounded partly on professional standards. Some more advanced projects would need more complete requirements documents and would benefit from a description language based on scientific notions allowing for better precision for specific system operations. Some business or safety critical systems would need an approach allowing for requirements simulation and verification. Requirements engineering education is an important objective to prepare future engineers to understand those requirements engineering needs and be prepared for practice in a professional setting. In the last five years, we have developed a requirements engineering method called Messir with a tool Excalibur and experiments in academia have been made to see how it was solving actual software engineering problems focusing first on requirements engineering education. Messir components represent in themselves some improvements w.r.t. the state of the art of the “standard” theories, methods and tools, mainly by introducing an improved requirements engineering process, language and verification support based on executable requirements specifications. Furthermore, the Messir approach solves also some actual problems related to software engineering education by offering a product line framework for setting up or improving courses in computer science curricula. The main result being to contribute to develop the software engineering capabilities of engineers and scientists that feed the job market in industry, research or education.
Highlights
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutralSince the software crisis, as addressed in the NATO conference [1], a huge amount of progress has been made on the research, engineering and teaching dimensions
We introduce and motivate the existing theories, methods and tools available for software engineering that constitute the main background of MESSIR
Theories: Concerning basic or more advanced theoretical notions applied to software engineering (SE) and exploited in the context of formal methods, MESSIR is mainly grounded on the following ones: (a) Set theory: concepts necessary for modeling information; (b) Mathematical logic: basic concept for declarative characterization of information and behavior properties; (c) Language theory: notions for textual modeling using domain specific languages; (d) Axiomatic semantics: notion for semantic interpretation of declarative descriptions; (e) Operational semantics: concepts for semantic interpretation of state modifications of abstract computing machine models
Summary
Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutralSince the software crisis, as addressed in the NATO conference [1], a huge amount of progress has been made on the research, engineering and teaching dimensions. In order to be more precise on what SE is, an important standardization effort by ISO and IEEE has been made in the last decade offering a proposal to define the SE body of knowledge [3]. The SWEBOK represents one of the best joint efforts from research, education and industry actors to improve the SE domain. It is used as a basis and is exploited in the remaining parts of the paper. We introduce and motivate the existing theories, methods and tools available for software engineering that constitute the main background of MESSIR. (e) Operational semantics: concepts for semantic interpretation of state modifications of abstract computing machine models The basic notions issued from scientific research that represents milestones and on which MESSIR is based are the following main notions: Theories: Concerning basic or more advanced theoretical notions applied to SE and exploited in the context of formal methods, MESSIR is mainly grounded on the following ones:
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