Requirements acquisition is one of the most important and least well supported parts of the software development process. The Requirements Apprentice (RA) will assist a human analyst in the creation and modification of software requirements. Unlike current requirements analysis tools, which assume a formal description language, the focus of the RA is on the boundary between informal and formal specifications. The RA is intended to support the earliest phases of creating a requirement, in which incompleteness, ambiguity, and contradiction are inevitable features. From an artificial intelligence perspective, the central problem the RA faces is one of knowledge acquisition. It has to develop a coherent internal representation from an initial set of disorganized statements. To do so, the RA will rely on a variety of techniques, including dependency-directed reasoning, hybrid knowledge representation, and the reuse of common forms (clich鳩. 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.

The goal of the Programmer's Apprentice project is to develop a theory of how expert programmers analyze, synthesize, modify, explain, specify, verify, and document programs. This research goal overlaps both artificial intelligence and software engineering. From the viewpoint of artificial intelligence, we have chosen programming as a domain in which to study fundamental issues of knowledge representation and reasoning. From the viewpoint of software engineering, we seek to automate the programming process by applying techniques from artificial intelligence.

Inspection methods are a kind of engineering problem solving based on the recognition and use of standard forms or cliches. Examples are given of program analysis, program synthesis and program validation by inspection. A formalism, called the Plan Calculus, is defined and used to represent programming cliches in a convenient, canonical, and programming-language independent fashion.