A user-friendly formal requirements specification method

Abstract

As formal methods are increasingly used in the development of industrial scale software systems, there is a growing awareness of the need to integrate the formal notations with existing structured software development methods. In order to make requirements analysis both comprehensible and rigorous, a User-Friendly Formal Requirements Specification Method is proposed in this paper by combining and extending DeMarco data flow diagrams with VDM (Vienna Development Method). The specifications produced using this method possess good readability, a well-designed structuring mechanism and precise semantics. The significant progress presented in this paper is to develop a verified analysis approach based on the concept of consistency checking for guaranteeing the correctness of analysis steps.