Towards operational natural language

TL;DR

This paper introduces specogramming, a novel approach that transforms natural language specifications into executable programs within IDEs, ensuring consistency across multiple views and simplifying documentation in software projects.

Contribution

It presents specogramming as a new method that integrates natural language specifications with programming environments to improve consistency and reduce errors in software documentation.

Findings

Specogramming enables automatic generation of consistent specification views.

The approach simplifies the documentation process for software specifications.

It integrates natural language specifications into object-oriented IDEs effectively.

Abstract

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.