Applying Reduction Techniques to Software Functional Requirement Specifications

Abstract. Requirement Specification is gaining increasingly attention as a critical phase of software systems development. As requirement descriptions evolve, they quickly become error-prone and difficult to understand. Thus, the development of techniques and tools to support requirement specification development, understanding, testing, maintenance and reuse becomes an important issue. This paper extends the well-known technique of program slicing to Functional Requirement Specification based on Use Case Maps notation. This new application of slicing, called UCM Requirement Slicing is useful to aid requirement comprehension and maintenance. In contrast to traditional program slicing, requirement slicing is designed to operate on the requirement specification of a system, rather than the source code of a program. The resulting requirement slice provides knowledge about high-level structure of a system, rather than its low-level implementation details. In order to compute a UCM Requirement slice, we provide a three steps slicing algorithm. Key words: Functional requirement specification, program slicing, use case maps, comprehension, maintenance.