Forming telecommunications software specifications from a service-driven model using enhanced software tools

Increasing diversity and sophistication among telecommunications customers has led to pressure on the telecommunications industry to give customer groups the capability to customize aspects of offered telecommunications services for their own particular needs. To offer such user-customizable services correctly, quickly, and cheaply, the telecommunications industry needs adequate techniques for transforming user requirements into software specifications and for realizing these software specifications with application code. In today's environment, several well-known software development life cycle processes exist for realizing software specifications; however, analogous techniques for transforming user requirements into explicit software specifications do not. This paper proposes a technique for transforming user requirements and then demonstrates its use on a sample telecommunications application. The technique creates a simulation environment that lets simulation users describe their application requirements and then determine the appropriate software specifications needed. The technique builds on aspects of a service-driven specification model and simulation software tools published earlier. Because the simulation environment derives from user requirements and produces software specifications, the proposed technique could represent the first phase of a service-driven software development life cycle process, eventually evolving from the nonservice-driven “requirements analysis” phase commonly used in practice today.