Integrating Animation into Informal Specification Writing for Requirements Analysis

Writing a specification has proved to be an effective way to aid requirements analysis, but how to effectively enhance communication between the user and the analyst during the writing to achieve correct requirements still remains a challenge. This paper proposes a systematic and automated approach to integrating specification animation into the process of writing a requirements specification. The animation is used to enhance communication to obtain feedbacks from the user for improving the present version of the specification. The principle of automatically generating an animation system from a SOFL informal specification is explained and the issues of how it facilitates the improvement of the present specification is discussed. A real world example is used to illustrate how the proposed technique can be applied in practice.