Deriving specifications from requirements through problem reduction

Software problems - problems whose solution is software-intensive - come in many forms. Given that software and computers are deeply embedded in society, one general characteristic of software problems is that their early requirements are expressed `deep into the world´, that is, in terms that end-users and other stake-holders would recognise and understand. The developer is left with the difficult task of interpreting such requirements closer to the software solution. Problem reduction is proposed as a systematic transformation for deriving specifications from requirements in the context of problem-oriented analysis. It allows the context of a problem to be simplified while re-expressing the requirement. It was applied in the context of Problem Frames and argued that it can be used as a systematic way of deriving specification statements from requirement statements via a sequence of transformed problems. The approach is illustrated in two examples