Software Development Process From Natural Language Specification

A process to derive incrementally a formal specification from an informal specification written in natural-language is presented. This process consists of two major activities, "design" and "elaborate". Through the design activity, the structure of software modules based on an object oriented model is interactively extracted from the informal English description. Each word such as nouns and verbs in the natural-language sentences is associated with a software concept, e.g. class, attribute, and method. Especially we concentrate on types of verb patterns occurring in the sentences to increase applicability to dynamic systems. The elaborate activity is one to refine and rewrite the informal specification more precisely based on the derived mod- ule design document. We can complete the formal specification through the elaborate - design activity cycle. Each document created in our process is called product. The integration man- agement of the various kinds of the products are supported by a hypertext system. Furthermore we discuss the whole of soft- ware development process in which the design process and the elaborate one are embedded.