The Capture Calculus Toolset

Distributed embedded systems, such as multi-player smartphone games, training instrumentation systems, and “smart” homes, naturally have complex requirements. These are difficult to elicit, represent, validate, and verify. For high confidence, one demands that the represented requirements reflect realistic uses of the system; however, such uses, often representing human actions in complex environments, can have hundreds to thousands of steps and be impractical to elicit and manage using only declarative or intensional (computed) representations. Non-functional requirements like scalability increase this complexity further. In this paper, I show how one can bootstrap requirements using data captured from initial prototypes deployed in small scale real world tests. Using such captures as seeds, I show how a calculus of transformations on captures, from captures to scenarios, among scenarios, and from scenarios back to captures can be used in several requirements engineering tasks. I describe a novel ecosystem of tools and transformations that implement this capture calculus and illustrate its use on data obtained from the domain of multi-player outdoor smartphone games.