An automated tool for specification validation: design and preliminary implementation

A specification is complete if it carries all the information required by the user, and minimal if it carries nothing but the information required by the user. The authors have designed a lifecycle of the requirements specification phase, whose purpose is to help achieve completeness and minimality by the proper use of redundancy. In their view of the lifecycle, the verification and validation group elicits information from the user and matches it against the generated specification to check completeness and minimality. In this paper, the authors give details of this lifecycle, and present an automated system that carries out the proofs of completeness and minimality using Prolog´s inference capability