In the requirements lies the power

• System requirements expressed as scenarios represent a rich source of knowledge about a system and the context in which it is used. This is because the scenarios are the result of extensive collaborative efforts of a wide variety of stakeholders and are in a form to which all can relate. Ideally, they serve to represent the interests of all stakeholders at each stage of the development life cycle. Our focus in this paper is system testing against requirements. In particular, we show (1) how the knowledge represented in scenarios (using ScenarioML) can be directly transformed into an operational knowledge base in a rule-based programming language (JESS), (2) how this knowledge base can be used in system testing to compute, manage, and compare expectations of system behavior to actual system behavior relative to the requirements, and (3) how this can be achieved in a manner that is transparent to all stakeholders. The power of this approach derives from the peculiarly reflective character of knowledge based systems and their explicit use of meta-information and meta-information processing. We demonstrate the viability of our approach by its application to the AquaLush system in which we detected several violations of the system's stated requirements.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Annan data- och informationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Other Computer and Information Science (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Computer programming

Data processing

Knowledge based systems

Knowledge engineering

System theory

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)