Software engineering tools currently available on the market are focused on solution design rather than on problem description. So-called requirement engineering (RE) tools enable companies to manage their requirements only once they got them out. But poor requirements, even well managed, will cause projects to fail. The presentation shows how CEDITI engineers proceed to produce requirements documents with GRAIL, a tool designed by RE practitioners for RE practitioners to enable them to do real requirements engineering. The tool relies on KAOS, the goal-driven requirements methodology. KAOS (Dardenne et al., 1993) advocates for modelling problems in the same flavor as engineers build models to describe solutions but with an appropriate ontology and notation.

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The KAOS methodology provides a language, a method, and meta-level knowledge for goal-driven requirements elaboration. The language provides a rich ontology for capturing requirements in terms of goals, constraints, objects, actions, agents etc. Links between requirements are represented its well to capture refinements, conflicts, operationalizations, responsibility assignments, etc. The KAOS specification language is a multi-paradigm language with a two-level structure: an outer semantic net layer for declaring concepts, their attributes and links to other concepts, and an inner formal assertion layer for formally defining the concept. The latter combines a real-time temporal logic for the specification of goals, constraints, and objects, and standard pre-/postconditions for the specification of actions and their strengthening to ensure the constraints.

ALMA is an environment kernel supporting the elaboration, analysis, documentation, and maintenance of the various products developed during an entire software lifecycle. Its central component is an environment database in which properties about software objects and relations are collected. Two kinds of tools are provided: high-level tools and syntax-directed tools. A basic feature of the ALMA kernel is its genericity. Tools of the first kind are parameterized on software lifecycle models while tools of the second kind are parameterized on formalisms. Versions of specific models and formalisms are generated by a meta-environment, which also generates the environment database structure tailored to the desired lifecycle model. The database support meta-system and the instatiated database support systems it generates are emphasized, including the architectural design decisions made and the mechanisms introduced for achieving parameterization on lifecycle models.>