Requirements engineering and program synthesis: mutually exclusive or synergistic?

There has often been a clash within the formal methods community between early life-cycle proponents, such as the requirements engineering community, and late life-cycle proponents, such as the program synthesis community. This paper first characterizes these positions and their underlying assumptions, and then exposes a common set of problems and approaches. The paper then proposes an integrated life-cycle framework and expounds on its potential benefits. Technical challenges to achieving this integrated life-cycle framework are described, as well as some preliminary work towards that goal.