Re: Re: Development: A Structured Problem Area?

Quoting Edmund Schweppe <schweppe-EkmVulN54Sk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

> Derek Richardson wrote:
>
> > The question, in my mind, is still
> > whether there is anything intrinsic to producing an implementation
> > from requirements that prevents a rule-based solution.
> 
> One can certainly come up with a rules-based solution for *specific*, 
> well-understood cases. However, I strongly suspect that a general 
> solution to the "create a set of requirements that can be used to 
> mechanically generate a solution" problem is NP-complete and thus 
> unsolvable within the life of the universe.

But haven't we, by definition, fully specified the requirements in a formal
fashion any time we ship a product? So the issue is solvable, the question is
whether we solve requirements issues during a manual implementation or whether
we solve the requirements issues first and then automatically produce an
implementation.

Paradigm shift. We can consider design and writing source as requirements
elicitation. We can then only consider compilation as implementation. In this
new frame of reference, my question becomes: how can we develop better way to
specify requirements than what we currently have? To me, that's asking how we
raise the level of abstraction of our requirements elicitation process, so that
we don't specify requirements using something as low-level as Java or C# or
whatever. Preferably something declarative so that we can specify what without
having to specify how.

Derek Richardson


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