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Automotive behavioral requirements expressed in a specification pattern system: a case study at BOSCH

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Abstract

To allow an automatic formal analysis of requirements, the requirements have to be formalized first. However, logical formalisms are seldom accessible to stakeholders in the automotive context. Konrad and Cheng proposed a specification pattern system (SPS) represented in a restricted English grammar that can be automatically translated to logics, but looks like natural language. In this paper, we investigate whether this SPS can be applied to automotive requirements of BOSCH, in the sense that it is expressive enough to specify automotive behavioral requirements of BOSCH. We did a case study over 289 informal behavioral requirements taken from automotive BOSCH projects. We evaluated whether these requirements could be formulated in the SPS and whether the SPS has to be adapted to the automotive context. The case study strongly indicates that the SPS, extended with 3 further patterns, is suited to specify automotive behavioral requirements at BOSCH.

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Notes

  1. Platform projects develop a collection of reusable artifacts, such as requirements, software components, test plans, etc. These artifacts are then reused in customer projects in order to build applications.

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Correspondence to Amalinda Post.

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Post, A., Menzel, I., Hoenicke, J. et al. Automotive behavioral requirements expressed in a specification pattern system: a case study at BOSCH. Requirements Eng 17, 19–33 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-011-0145-9

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