SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS ELABORATION WITH DECISION TABLES

Abstract

The paper describes decision table notation as a requirements definition technique. Modern critical systems, e.g., railway signaling systems, are implemented with electronic technologies. The use of computers in these systems has greatly expanded their functionality. Increase in functionality unfortunately leads to increase in complexity, which forces the designer to follow a more rigorous development process. The paper discusses the subject of describing expected software behavior, i.e., software requirements specification. It presents desired requirements features and describes how these features can be obtained by use of decision tables. The paper also discusses decision table transformations, which can reduce the effort to establish decision tables and facilitate their analysis. The authors’ experiments support the use of decision tables as a mean to increase requirements quality by providing tools for automatic decision table processing.

Keywords

• decision tables
• software engineering
• semi-formal methods