Abstract
Like software, requirements evolve and change frequently during the development process. Refactoring is the process of reorganising software without changing its behaviour, to make it easier to understand and modify. We propose refactoring for formalised requirements to reduce repetition in the requirement set so that they are easier to maintain as the system and requirements evolve. This work-in-progress paper describes our motivation for and initial approach to refactoring requirements in NASA’s Formal Requirements Elicitation Tool (FRET). This work was directly triggered by our experience with an industrial aircraft engine software controller use case. In this paper, we reflect on the requirements that were obtained and, with a view to their maintainability, propose and outline functionality for refactoring fretish requirements.
The authors thank Georgios Giantamidis, Stylianos Basagiannis, and Vassilios A. Tsachouridis (United Technologies Research Center, Ireland) for their collaboration in the requirements elicitation process; and Anastasia Mavridou (KBR/NASA Ames Research Center, USA) for her help with FRET.
This research was financially supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the VALU3S project (grant No 876852). This project is also funded by Enterprise Ireland (grant No IR20200054). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Eclipse: https://www.eclipse.org/ide/.
References
Bourbouh, H., et al.: Integrating formal verification and assurance: an inspection rover case study. In: Dutle, A., Moscato, M.M., Titolo, L., Muñoz, C.A., Perez, I. (eds.) NFM 2021. LNCS, vol. 12673, pp. 53–71. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-76384-8_4
Bourbouh, H., Garoche, P.L., Loquen, T., Noulard, É., Pagetti, C.: CoCoSim, a code generation framework for control/command applications an overview of CoCoSim for multi-periodic discrete Simulink models. In: European Congress on Embedded Real Time Software and Systems (2020)
Conrad, E., Titolo, L., Giannakopoulou, D., Pressburger, T., Dutle, A.: A compositional proof framework for FRETish requirements. In: Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Certified Programs and Proofs, pp. 68–81 (2022)
Deshpande, G., Arora, C., Ruhe, G.: Data-driven elicitation and optimization of dependencies between requirements. In: International Requirements Engineering Conference, pp. 416–421. IEEE (2019)
Farrell, M., Luckcuck, M., Sheridan, O., Monahan, R.: FRETting about requirements: formalised requirements for an aircraft engine controller. In: Gervasi, V., Vogelsang, A. (eds.) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2022. LNCS, vol. 13216, pp. 96–111. Springer, Cham (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98464-9_9
Farrell, M., Mavrakis, N., Ferrando, A., Dixon, C., Gao, Y.: Formal modelling and runtime verification of autonomous grasping for active debris removal. Front. Robot. AI 8, 639282 (2022)
Fowler, M., Beck, K.: Refactoring: improving the design of existing code. The Addison-Wesley object technology series. Addison-Wesley (1999)
Giannakopoulou, D., Pressburger, T., Mavridou, A., Schumann, J.: Automated formalization of structured natural language requirements. Inf. Software Technol. 137, 106590 (2021)
Luckcuck, M., Farrell, M., Sheridan, O., Monahan, R.: A methodology for developing a verifiable aircraft engine controller from formal requirements. In: IEEE Aerospace Conference (2022)
Mavridou, A., et al.: The ten Lockheed martin cyber-physical challenges: formalized, analyzed, and explained. In: International Requirements Engineering Conference, pp. 300–310. IEEE (2020)
Mavridou, A., Katis, A., Giannakopoulou, D., Kooi, D., Pressburger, T., Whalen, M.W.: From Partial to global assume-guarantee contracts: compositional realizability analysis in FRET. In: Huisman, M., Păsăreanu, C., Zhan, N. (eds.) FM 2021. LNCS, vol. 13047, pp. 503–523. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90870-6_27
Perez, I., Dedden, F., Goodloe, A.: Copilot 3. Technical report, NASA/TM-2020-220587, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (2020)
Ramos, R., et al.: Improving the Quality of Requirements with Refactoring. In: Simpósio Brasileiro de Qualidade de Software, pp. 141–155. Sociedade Brasileira de Computação (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Farrell, M., Luckcuck, M., Sheridan, O., Monahan, R. (2022). Towards Refactoring FRETish Requirements. In: Deshmukh, J.V., Havelund, K., Perez, I. (eds) NASA Formal Methods. NFM 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13260. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06773-0_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06773-0_14
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06772-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06773-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)