Towards operational natural language
This addresses the error-prone process of maintaining consistency in software specifications for stakeholders in software development, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing object-oriented development environments.
The paper tackles the problem of ensuring consistency across multiple software specification views by introducing specogramming, which transforms structured natural-language specifications into runnable programs that automatically generate consistent-by-construction views, including structured natural language.
The multiplicity of software projects' stakeholders and activities leads to the multiplicity of software specification views and thus creates the need to establish mutual consistency between them. The process of establishing such consistency is error-prone and requires adequate tool support. The present article introduces specogramming - an approach that treats a modern object-oriented integrated development environment as a word processor. The approach turns the process of documenting initial specifications into a simplified form of programming and turns structured-natural-language specifications into runnable programs that yield multiple consistent-by-construction views, one of which is structured natural language.