Specifiying and Validating Requirements: The VENUS System

Requirements specification and validation is recognized as a crucial part of the information systems Y development process. This paper presents the VENUS integrated environment for requirements engineering. The underlying conceptual framework of VENUS combines the entity-relationship, object-oriented and rule-based paradigms for data and behaviour modelling. VENUS tools enable systems analysts to formulate, analyse and validate requirements specifications which can be automatically mapped either to a C++ prototype or to the model of Rule-Based Nets (RBNs), a variant of Predicate-Tra nsition Nets. RBNs constitute an executable model of requirements specifications and can be studied by analytical PN algorithms, animated and validated against test cases. The VENUS environment, therefore, provides an integrated, complete and formal, yet user-friendly, framework for requirements engineering. A VENUS prototype has been implemented so far, and work is still in progress towards (i) full-scale development and (ii) mapping of executable requirements specifications to design and implementation structures.

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