The difficulty of generating a design from a set of requirements increases as products become more complex. Translating a set of specifications written in a spoken language into a computer-parsable format presents a number of problems. First, the specifications must be correctly interpreted and understood. This goal is difficult to achieve because the semantics of spoken languages are context-sensitive, leading to confusion. It is also possible to generate an incomplete specification. Designers may not find a problem until late in the design cycle, when the required reworking is costly. Many products contain both hardware and software components, and a sentence may mean different things to a software engineer and a hardware engineer. If you write the specification at a level of abstraction significantly higher than the implementation language supports, difficult-to-find translation errors can occur.
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