Towards a Graphical Tool for Refining User to System Requirements

Informal and abstract user requirement specifications are usually complemented by formal and detailed system requirement specifications. While user requirements provide a high level description of what services the system is expected to provide, system requirements provide a more technical specification of how that services should be provided by the system. One of the relevant problems that arise during the Requirement Engineering process is the result of failing to make a clear transition between different levels of requirements description.Goal of this paper is to introduce a graphical tool for requirements refinement which guides software architects while moving from user requirements to (architec-tural-level) system requirements. The tool makes use of a previous work that gives a simple but expressive graphical formalism, based on UML2.0 Sequence Diagrams, for specifying temporal properties.