Specifying Industrial System Requirements Using Specification Patterns: A Case Study Of Evaluation With Practitioners

With the ever-increasing size and complexity of the industrial software systems there is an imperative need for an automated, systematic and exhaustive verification of various software artifacts, such as system specifications, models, code, etc. A potential remedy for this need might lie in a pool of techniques for computer-aided verification of software related artifacts, including system specifications. The Achilles' heel of these techniques, and the main hinder for their wider adoption in the industrial development process are the complexity and the specialized skill-set required for the formal encoding of specifications. To alleviate this problem, Specification Patterns that are based on the observation that the system specifications are framed within reoccurring solutions have been proposed. The approach has been shown to be expressive enough for capturing requirements in the automotive domain, however, there is a lack of empirical data that can be used to judge its practical usefulness. In this paper, we involve an existing specification-patterns-based tool, called PROPAS, and propose a small-size evaluation of the approach with practitioners, on a case study conducted in cooperation with Scania, Sweden, one of the world's leading manufacturers of heavy-load vehicles. Our results show that the specification patterns that are supported by an adequate tooling have the potential to be practically usefull for the non-experts in formal methods.