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Detecting Requirements Defects Utilizing A Mathematical Framework for Behavior Engineering

Behavior Engineering (BE) provides a rigorous way to derive a formal specification of a software system from the requirements written in natural language. Its graphical specification language, Behavior Tree (BT), has been used with success in industry to systematically translate large, complex, and often erroneous requirements into an integrated model of the software system. BE's process, the Behavior Modeling Process (BMP), allows requirements to be translated into individual requirement BTs one at a time, which are then integrated to form a holistic view of the system. The integrated BT then goes through a series of modifications to construct a specification BT, which is used for validation and verification. The BMP also addresses different types of defects in the requirements throughout its process. However, BT itself is a graphical modeling notation, and the types of integration relations, how they correspond to particular issues, how they should be integrated and how to get formal specification have not been clearly defined. As a result, the BMP is informal, and provides guidelines to perform all these tasks on an ad-hoc basis. In this paper, we first introduce a mathematical framework which defines the graphical form of BTs which we use to define the integration relationships of BTs and to formalize the integration strategy of the BMP. We then formulate semi-automated requirements defects detection techniques by utilizing this underlying mathematical framework, which may be extended to formalize the BMP, develop change management framework for it, build techniques for round-trip engineering and so on.