Stepwise Refinement of Software Development Problem Analysis

The Problem Frames approach has attracted attention because it enables developers to carefully analyze problems in a reasonable manner. Despite that this approach decomposes a problem into subproblems before the analysis is conducted, developers are still faced with a complex analysis when they consider interactions between the various subproblems. Moreover, progressive evolution of requirements is important for flexible development. In this paper, we propose methods to analyze multiple abstraction layers of a problem. Our methods help developers to construct abstract versions of a problem and find relationships between abstract problems and concrete problems. Moreover, our methods support refinement of arguments such that the properties of the abstract problem are preserved in the concrete problem. Therefore, our methods enable developers to divide up arguments into multiple abstraction layers and thus mitigate the complexity of argumentation. We carried out preliminary experiments on abstracting problems and constructing reasonable arguments. Our methods are expected to enable developers to analyze problems in a reasonable manner with less complexity and thus make problem analysis easier.