Are their design specifications consistent with our requirements?

Abstract

During the development of large and complex systems it is important to ensure consistency between requirements and design specifications in order to guarantee that the system being developed meets the specified requirements, or to support the reuse of existing software systems or components. We propose a knowledge base approach to assist with consistency checking of design specifications, represented as UML models, against functional requirements specifications, expressed in natural language. Our approach is goal-driven where the requirements and design specifications are represented in the knowledge base as axioms, which define goals. In order to demonstrate and evaluate the approach a prototype tool has been implemented. This tool has been designed to provide a general platform for managing consistency between software artefacts generated during different phases of software system development.