Applying the SCR Requirements Specification Method to Practical Systems: A Case Study.

摘要

Studies have shown that the majority of errors in software systems are due to incorrect requirements specifications. The root cause of many requirements errors is the imprecision and ambiguity that arise because the software requirements are expressed in natural language. An effective way to reduce such errors is to express requirements in a formal notation. For a number of years, researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) have been working on a formal method based on tables to specify the requirements of practical systems 2, 11. Known as the Software Cost Reduction (SCR) method, this approach was originally formulated to document the requirements of the Operational Flight Program (OFP) for the U.S. Navy's A-7 aircraft 2. Since SCR's introduction more than a decade ago, many industrial organizations, including Lockheed, Grumman, and Ontario Hydro, have used SCR to specify requirements. Recently, NRL has developed both a formal state machine model 12, 14 to define the SCR semantics and a set of software tools to support analysis and validation of SCR requirements specifications 10. The tools support consistency and completeness checking, simulation, and model checking.