A Requirements Verification Supporting Tool For Embedded Systems

As well known, the requirements elicitation process is the first step and a crucial step inthe software development process. In this step, the analyst need to output strictly correctrequirements specification. We usually adopt the requirements verification process to ensurethe correctness of the requirements specification. The purpose of the requirements verificationprocess is to verify whether we build the right product in the requirements specification.In the requirements verification process, artificially verifying not only can not guaranteethe accuracy of the results, the workload is also very large. So the requirements verifyingmember need to select a suitable requirements verification tool to manage the requirementsverification process, and efficiently verify requirements. The function of the current tools forrequirements verification is relatively simplex, so these tools often can not fully meet theneeds of the user. Therefore, providing an integrated verification tool, which can make theuser use several kinds of verifying method and help the user to use these methods, isnecessary.Based on this, on the basis of the in-depth study of the current requirements verificationmethods and tools, this article developed a requirements verification supporting tool for usersto review and formally verify the software requirements specification. So there are two partsin this article. First part, this tool can help users to verify the part of the specification which iswritten in natural language by reviewing method. Second, the tool provides a formalverification method to verify the statechart which is used to represent the goal system. Theseare also the most two popular verification methods used for verifying embedded softwarerequirements specification.Firstly, this article study the current process of requirements review used in company orschool, then extract the problems they have met in the review process, and design thefunctions of this article to these problems. The functions of this tool mainly include: providinga problem table, produce the review report automatically, and produce problem tables and so on. These functions can help users to reduce the workload. Secondly, considering theembedded software is usually described by the statechart, this article integrates a formalverification method to this tool. This article selects SMV developed by Carnegie MellonUniversity as the formally verifying tool. But the fresh user usually can not use SMV verysmoothly because SMV has its own input language. So this article provides a function to helpthe user to translate the statechart to the input language of SMV.In the end, this article uses an elevator system as the example to execute the functions ofthis tool. And eventually produce the verification report of the specification of the elevatorcontrol systemOn the basis of studying of requirements verification methods and requirementsverification tools, this article provides a frame of requirements verification supporting tool.Based on this frame, other researchers can integrate more verification tools and methods toenrich functions of this tool.