The Requirements Apprentice: automated assistance for requirements acquisition

An automated tool called the Requirements Apprentice (RA) which assists a human analyst in the creation and modification of software requirements is presented. Unlike most other requirements analysis tools, which start from a formal description language, the focus of the RA is on the transition between informal and formal specifications. The RA supports the earliest phases of creating a requirement, in which ambiguity, contradiction, and incompleteness are inevitable. From an artificial intelligence perspective, the central problem the RA faces is one of knowledge acquisition. The RA develops a coherent internal representation of a requirement from an initial set of disorganized imprecise statements. To do so, the RA relies on a variety of techniques, including dependency-directed reasoning, hybrid knowledge representations and the reuse of common forms (cliches). An annotated transcript showing an interaction with a working version of the RA is given