Seamless development applicability: an experiment

Requirements and code, in conventional software engineering wisdom, belong to entirely different worlds. The usual view in software engineering considers requirements documents and source code as different artifacts, under the responsibility of different people. This approach, however, introduces communication overhead, and raises the question of how to keep the various artifacts consistent when either of them needs to change. A change introduced to any of the mentioned artifacts needs to be synchronized with the others. At some point the control is inevitably lost: for example, a critical bug is found during the software operation, and the software developers dig into the fixing process directly, because there is no time to wait until the requirements analysts and system architects update their documents to let the developers actually fix the problem. Is it possible to unify the two worlds? A unified framework could help make software easier to change and reuse. To explore the feasibility of such an approach, the case study reported here takes a classic example from the requirements engineering literature and describes it using a programming language framework to express both domain and machine properties. The paper describes the solution, discusses its benefits and limitations, and assesses its scalability.