Tools for the modelling and analysis of requirements for telecommunication systems

Requirements Analysis is considered as a crucial activity of the software
lifecycle and has a strong impact on its maintenability.
The requirement document forms a contractual basis between customers
expressing their needs about the software to be developed, and
the software engineer in charge of implementing it.

Several formalisms (e.g. MERISE, SADT and OMT) are currently available.
They are used to describe the functional part of the requirements document.
But these approaches have two weaknesses. On one hand, they do not
allow to model all the apects of the requirements document (viz.
deadlines, security and reliability aspects, etc.).
On the other hand, it is not possible to develop
powerful tools to support those modelling languages (i.e. tools
which checks the soundness of the requirements document and
which help the adequacy of the requirements document with the
real requirements expressed by the customers).

The goal of the CAT applied research project is the development
of CASE tools to support the modelling and the analysis of requirements
for distributed and real-time systems.
These tools will rely on the ALBERT language developed
at the University of Namur and which has been used to model requirements for telecommunication applications, computer integrated manufacturing and
distributed process control.

Through its goal, CAT project aims to:

• reinforce the know-how in requirements analysis currently available in
  some companies;
  
• sensitize and offer guidance to companies experiencing problems
  with the writing of requirements documents.