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Despite advancements in requirements generation models, methods and tools, low quality requirements are still being produced. One potential avenue for addressing this problem is to provide the requirements engineer with an interactive environment that leads (or guides) him/her through a structured set of integrated activities that foster "good" quality requirements. While that is our ultimate goal, a necessary first step in developing such an environment is to create a formal specification mechanism for characterizing the structure, process flow and activities inherent to the requirements generation process. In turn, such specifications can serve as a basis for developing an interactive environment supporting requirements engineering. Reflecting the above need, we have developed a markup language, the Requirements Generation Markup Language (RGML), which can be used to characterize a requirements generation process. The RGML can describe process structure, flow of control, and individual activities. Within activities, the RGML supports the characterization of application instantiation, the use of templates and the production of artifacts. The RGML can also describe temporal control within a process as well as conditional expressions that control if and when various activity scenarios will be executed. The language is expressively powerful, yet flexible in its characterization capabilities, and thereby, provides the capability to describe a wide spectrum of different requirements generation processes. / Master of Science

In this dissertation it is shown that abstract data types (ADTs) can be specified by the Classified Model (CM) specification language - a first-order Horn language with equality and sort "classification" assertations. It is shown how these sort assertations generalize the traditional syntactic signatures of ADT specifications, resulting in all of the specification capability of traditional equational specifications, but with the improved expressibility of the Horn-with-equality language and additional theorem proving applications such as program synthesis. This work extends corresponding results from Many Sorted Algebra (MSA), Order Sorted Algebra (OSA) and Order Sorted Model (OSM) specification techniques by promoting their syntactic signatures to assertions in the Classified Model Specification language, yet retaining sorted quantification. It is shown how this solves MSA problems such as error values, polymorphism and subtypes in a way different from the OSA and OSM solutions. However, the CM technique retains the MSA and order sorted approach to parameterization. The CS generalization also suggests the use of CM specifications to axiomatize modules as a generalization of variables within Hoare Logic, with application to a restricted, but safe, use of procedures as state changing operations and functions as value returning operations of a module. CM proof theory and semantics are developed, including theorems for soundness, completeness and the existence of a free model.

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Change management is a discipline fundamental to the task of building ever more complex computing systems. Properly managed change provides a means whereby alterations to existing components of a complex artefact and their relationships can be evaluated, managed and evolved. This thesis takes as its example Official RAAF Publications, some of which need to be revised as a result of changes to the system they describe. The thesis develops a model of change propagation providing a set of operations to examine and record the changes to a set of publications. Additional operations enable coping with reversing decisions and handling the unexpected arrival of externally generated amendments. The model is extended to cover a finer granularity of entities (at the page level) to determine whether this greater level of detail would ease some tasks. A further extension provides the notion of relationships between the publications of concern, focusing on a dependency relationship between two publications. This enables exploration of the possibility of improving the process by reducing the risk of missing publications needing revision and providing a means by which some tasks can be partly automated thus speeding up the process. The models presented were developed in Sum, a variant of the Z specification language, to gain greater insight into the essential details of the operations and data structures involved. By ignoring implementation details the essential logical steps of each model can be emphasised and their differences and similarities contrasted. This thesis demonstrates that fine-grained change management is feasible. The thesis develops processes that automatically track the status of changes as they are propagated through a set of documents. The greater knowledge of work done on individual pages allows only the page(s) of concern to be affected. The work also enables recommendations to be made as to the applicability of each model and, by comparing the models, provides insight into the amount of work and resources required for tackling change at different levels of granularity.

Change management is a discipline fundamental to the task of building ever more complex computing systems. Properly managed change provides a means whereby alterations to existing components of a complex artefact and their relationships can be evaluated, managed and evolved. This thesis takes as its example Official RAAF Publications, some of which need to be revised as a result of changes to the system they describe. The thesis develops a model of change propagation providing a set of operations to examine and record the changes to a set of publications. Additional operations enable coping with reversing decisions and handling the unexpected arrival of externally generated amendments. The model is extended to cover a finer granularity of entities (at the page level) to determine whether this greater level of detail would ease some tasks. A further extension provides the notion of relationships between the publications of concern, focusing on a dependency relationship between two publications. This enables exploration of the possibility of improving the process by reducing the risk of missing publications needing revision and providing a means by which some tasks can be partly automated thus speeding up the process. The models presented were developed in Sum, a variant of the Z specification language, to gain greater insight into the essential details of the operations and data structures involved. By ignoring implementation details the essential logical steps of each model can be emphasised and their differences and similarities contrasted. This thesis demonstrates that fine-grained change management is feasible. The thesis develops processes that automatically track the status of changes as they are propagated through a set of documents. The greater knowledge of work done on individual pages allows only the page(s) of concern to be affected. The work also enables recommendations to be made as to the applicability of each model and, by comparing the models, provides insight into the amount of work and resources required for tackling change at different levels of granularity.