An object-oriented approach to software requirements specification

Most of the available techniques for requirements specification concentrate on functional decomposition and provide relatively weak structures for expressing them. In this dissertation, an object-driven methodology for analyzing requirements and constructing high-level system structure for large-scale software is presented. Generally, we construct the requirements specification by identifying the system layers explicitly in hierarchical system graph and specifying functional and non-functional requirements on this global system architecture through the internal object structure and conceptual model. Our object-oriented approach emphasizes using a graphical guideline to do requirements specification rather than using additional specification language to improve the understanding. The graphical guideline also provides a better mechanism for a software designer to specify and organize software as well as for a reader to understand the software system.