Bridging the gap between requirements engineering and systems architecting: the Elephant Specification Language

Abstract

This article presents a domain-specific language for writing highly structured multilevel system specifications. The language effectively bridges the gap between requirements engineering and systems architecting by enabling the direct derivation of a dependency graph from the system specifications. The dependency graph allows for the easy manipulation, visualization and analysis of the system architecture, ensuring the consistency among written system specifications and visual system architecture models. The system architecture models provide direct feedback on the completeness of the system specifications. The language and associated tooling has been made publicly available and has been applied in several industrial case studies. In this article, the fundamental concepts and way of working of the language are explained using an illustrative example.

Keywords

• Requirements
• Specification
• System architecture
• Language design structure matrix
• DSM
• Function
• Design
• behavior
• dependency derivation