Maintaining Families of Rigorous Requirements for Embedded Software Systems

Abstract

The first part of this book introduces to families of rigorous software requirements, and how to organize them into requirements modules. A family of requirements must be organized rather differently than the requirements for a single system. We start with the information hiding principle and develop our notion of requirements module from it. We then add this concept to a current approach. Our notion of requirements module allows us to understand some current problems better, and also to propose solutions. The second part of this book looks at one of the requirements modules in more detail, which is the user interface requirements module. We look at how the requirements for the user interface can be encapsulated. We also make a link back to one kind of the current maintenance problems, which are the "feature interaction" problems. We view these problems from the perspective of human-computer interaction. This gives us interesting new means for reducing them.