THE REQUIREMENTS APPRENTICE - AUTOMATED ASSISTANCE FOR REQUIREMENTS ACQUISITION

Requirements acquisition is one of the most important and least supported parts of the software development process. The Requirements Apprentice (RA) assists a human analyst in the creation and modification of software requirements. Unlike most other requirements analysis tools, which start from a formal description language, the focus of the RA is on the transition between informal and formal specifications. The RA supports the earliest phases of creating a requirement, in which ambiguity, contradiction, and incompleteness are inevitable. From an artificial intelligence perspective, the central problem the RA faces is one of knowledge acquisition. The RA develops a coherent internal representation of a requirement from an initial set of disorganized imprecise statements. To do so, the RA relies on a variety of techniques, including dependency-directed reasoning, hybrid knowledge representation, and the reuse of common forms (cliches). The Requirements Apprentice is being developed in the context of the Programmer's Apprentice project, whose overall goal is the creation of an intelligent assistant for all aspects of software development.