Documents are important sources of system requirements. This is particularly true of domains that are document-centric in terms of their operational and development processes. For system evolution in organisations that have been subject to organisational change and loss of organisational memory, documents may be the major source of key requirements. Hence, systems engineers often face a daunting task of synthesising crucial requirements from a range of documents that include standards, interview transcripts and legacy specifications. The goal of REVERE was to investigate support for this task which has been described as document archaeology (Robertson and Robertson, 1999). This paper describes the resulting REVERE toolset, its utility for document archaeology and for other tasks that have emerged in the course of our experiments with the toolset.

Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) techniques support systematic modularization and composition of crosscutting concerns. Though AOSD techniques have been proposed to handle crosscutting concerns at various stages during the software life cycle, there is a traceability gap between the aspects at the requirements level and those at later development stages. It is not clear what proof obligations about an aspect-oriented implementation follow from the initial aspectual requirements. This paper presents PROBE, a framework for generation of proof obligations for aspect-oriented systems from the initial aspectual requirements and associated trade-offs. The abstract proof obligations are expressed in standard linear temporal logic. Key components of the framework include an extended Ontology with parametric temporal formulas and functions, and extensive treatment of conflicts among requirements. The resultant temporal logic assertions, grouped into specifications of aspect implementations, can then be instantiated in terms of the implementation and verification tools. 1.

An approach for the semi-automated recovery of traceability links between software documentation and source code is presented. The methodology is based on the application of information retrieval techniques to extract and analyze the semantic information from the source code and associated documentation. A semi-automatic process is defined based on the proposed methodology. The paper advocates the use of latent semantic indexing (LSI) as the supporting information retrieval technique. Two case studies using existing software are presented comparing this approach with others. The case studies show positive results for the proposed approach, especially considering the flexibility of the methods used.

Business change is often accompanied by loss of continuity of experience. This has serious implications for the adaptation of an organisation's software since people with detailed knowledge of either the software or business processes may be unavailable to inform its adaptation. In many cases organisational memory will persist principally in the form of documents such as requirements specifications, operating procedures, regulatory standards, etc. These offer an important resource for informing what features of the software are redundant, need to be retained or can be reused. Exploiting this resource poses formidable problems, however, since it is often incomplete, poorly structured, poorly maintained and voluminous. This paper proposes that tools exploiting probabilistic natural language processing techniques offer the potential to ease these problems. Such tools are available, mature and have been proven in other domains. 1. Introduction Many organisations react to changes to their...

Aspect-oriented software development (AOSD) techniques support the systematic modularization and composition of crosscutting concerns, the so-called “aspects”. Though AOSD techniques have been proposed to handle crosscutting concerns at various stages during the software life cycle, there are gaps between the aspects at the requirements level, those at the design level, and those implemented at later development stages. It is not clear what proof obligations about an aspect-oriented implementation follow from the initial aspectual requirements, or from design elements given in UML. This validation problem is further compounded by the lack of traceability of aspectual requirements and their associated trade-offs through to subsequent design and implementation-level refinements. This paper presents PROBE, a framework for generating proof obligations for aspect-oriented systems from the initial aspectual requirements and associated trade-offs, as well as from designs of aspects. The abstract proof obligations are expressed in standard linear temporal logic. Key components of the framework include an extended ontology with parametric temporal formulas and functions, and extensive treatment of conflicts among requirements. The proof obligations generated from designs of aspects are integrated with those from the requirements stage. The resultant temporal logic assertions, grouped into specifications of aspect implementations, can then be instantiated in terms of the implementation and intended verification tool. The result provides input to formal methods tools such as model-checkers, or can be used in the specification and generation of test cases. 1.

Software development is a dynamic process where engineers constantly refine their systems. As a consequence, all software artifacts and their logical relationships evolve. At times, the evolutionary changes may reduce the consistency of the software project and break semantic connections among documents. We use the term conformance to denote the state where the network formed by software documents and their relationships is in semantic harmony. Conformance analysis is the process of determining whether software documents and their logical relationships are in agreement. In our previous research, we have developed a formalism that can be used to verify strategies to conformance analysis. In this paper, we describe modifications to that formalism, and its applications to build conformance analysis tools in an integrated development environment that is extensible to incorporate new conformance analysis strategies and to combine multiple strategies together. 1