Abstract
Software continues to play a prominant and critical role in large business applications, technical endeavors in space missions, and control systems for airlines, railways, and telecommunications. Software for managing these applications is complex to construct. The source of complexity of a software product lies in the set of stringent requirements, system integrity constraints, and the vast amount of knowledge necessary to adequately describe the expected interaction of the software with its environment. When all requirements are not properly understood, recorded, and communicated within the development team, there is a gap between the documented requirements and the requirements actually needed for correct functioning of the system. The inability in mastering the complexity leads to this discrepancy, which is the root cause of software errors. Precise documentation of requirements with sufficient detail to cover unexpected worst-case scenarios is a good defense against system errors.
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© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Alagar, V.S., Periyasamy, K. (1998). The Role of Specification. In: Specification of Software Systems. Graduate Texts in Computer Science. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-2920-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-2920-7_1
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