Formal Methods and its Importance in Minimizing Ambiguity in the Requirement Engineering Document phase of SDLC

Abstract

The Requirements are the foundation for delivering quality software. And in todays business era different business organization needs commercial software and the software need to be delivered on time and within budget. And thus we need a complete, concise and accurate requirement engineering document. But most of the software which is delivered have errors, bugs and lack of functionality. And the reason for this is that the RE document is always written in natural language which is prone to ambiguities. And thus we need a mathematical method or a scientific method for writing RE documents. The formal methods in the past few years emerged as a most important or central issues in software engineering. And the precise specification, modeling and verification is identified in most of the engineering disciplines. And the formal methods provide us a tool to precisely describe a system correctly. The formal methods are a particular kind of mathematical techniques meant for specification, development and verification of software and hardware system. The primary reason of using mathematical formalism in RE text is the quality of the requirements and possibility of automation of some of the processes. In this paper we compare the different types of formal methods by analyzing there merits and demerits in the background of the different parameters like concurrency control, object oriented concepts and requirement engineering perspective.

Keywords: Formal Methods, Lexical Ambiguity, Syntax Ambiguity, Semantic Ambiguity, Requirement Engineering Document (RE Text), Software Crisis

View PDF