| Abstract: | Software Requirements Specifications (SRS) have been used to fill the communication gap between systems analysts and the end-users. SRSs should satisfy the needs of both systems analysts and end-users. Non-technical end-users require intelligible SRSs while systems analysts need more precise, clear and concise SRSs. Object-oriented methods cannot represent temporal relations between events precisely. However, object-oriented principles are widely used in systems analysis and designing. Hence, there is a need for a software requirements specification language which supports object-oriented analysis methods, represents temporal knowledge precisely and whose representation scheme resembles natural languages. The specification language presented in this paper, GSL, is designed to meet the above requirements. The language is based on First-order Temporal Logic (FTL), which has temporal operators in addition to classical logical connectives and quantifiers. Since FTL cannot represent relative temporal knowledge and it inherits problems with point-based time models, a new logical connective TAND and redefined AND connective are used to represent relative temporal knowledge and to solve the problems with FTL. The language employs object-oriented principles: events, conditions, rules and activities can be represented as objects as well as attributes of an object. However, systems analysts can decide whether to use object-oriented conceptual modeling or not. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
