The Automated Refinement of a Requirements Domain Theory

摘要

The specification and management of requirements is widely considered to be one of the most important yet most problematic activities in software engineering. In some applications, such as in safety critical areas or knowledge-based systems, the construction of a requirements domain theory is regarded as an important part of this activity. Building and maintaining such a domain theory, however, requires a large investment and a range of powerful validation and maintenance tools. The area of theory refinement is concerned with the use of training data to automatically change an existing theory so that it better fits the data. Theory refinement techniques, however, have not been extensively used in applications because of the problems in scaling up their underlying algorithms.