An approach on integrating models and textual specifications

The time-to-market pressure and the introduction of new development standards into automotive industry have created interest in systematic approaches across the whole product lifecycle. Model-based design and testing methods and tools have been successfully introduced into development processes of car manufacturers and suppliers. Surprisingly, in practice the elicitation and specification of requirements remained largely unaffected by the introduction of model-based methods, while much effort has been spent on the introduction of functional specifications. As a consequence, where functional specifications exist, these are often created unsystematically and are of poor quality, leading to further problems during design, implementation and testing. In this paper we present an approach to improve specification quality through systemization of specification structures based on architectural block diagrams, behavioural statecharts and propositional logic structures. The approach has been implemented in a tool. Experiences from the application of approach and tool in industrial projects are reported.