Advances in Requirements Engineering: Bridging the Gap between Stakeholders’ Needs and Formal Designs

Abstract

The lions’s share of the software faults can be traced to requirements and specification errors, so improvements in requirements engineering can have a large impact on the effectiveness of the overall system development process. A weak link in the chain is the transition from the vague and informal needs of system stakeholders to the formal models that support theoretical analysis and software tools. This paper explains the context for the 2007 Monterey workshop that was dedicated to this problem. It provides the case study that participants were asked to use to illustrate their new methods, and summarizes the discussion and conclusions of the workshop.