A theory of requirements capture and its applications

Abstract

A theory of requirements capture is developed. Some concepts, such as new law, user’s rejection, and reconstruction of a specification are defined; the related theorems are proved. The concepts of capture process and the limit of a capture process are further established. It is proved that, given a user’s model and a specification, there is a procedure that all processes generated from the procedure and starting with the specification are convergent, and their limit is the truth of the model. Some computational aspects of reconstructions are studied. Some applications of the theory are briefly discussed, especially, an editor called SpecReviser is introduced.