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Goal-oriented methods are increasingly popular for elaborating software requirements. They offer systematic support for incrementally building intentional, structural and operational models of the software and its environment. They also provide various techniques for early analysis, notably, to manage conflicting goals or to anticipate abnormal environment behaviours that prevent goals from being achieved. On the other hand, tabular event-based methods are well-established for specifying operational requirements for control software. They provide sophisticated techniques and tools for late analysis of software behaviour models through simulation, model checking or table exhaustiveness checks. The paper proposes to take the best out of these two worlds to engineer requirements for control software. It presents a technique for deriving event-based specifications, written in the SCR tabular language, from operational specifications built according to the KAOS goal-oriented method. The technique consists of a series of transformation steps each of which resolves semantic, structural or syntactic differences between the KAOS source language and the SCR target language. Some of these steps need human intervention and illustrate the kind of semantic subtleties that need to be taken into account when integrating multiple formalisms. As a result of our technique SCR specifiers may use upstream goal-based processes à la KAOS for the incremental elaboration, early analysis, organization and documentation of their tables, while KAOS modelers may use downstream tables à la SCR for later analysis of the behaviour models derived from goal specifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ALMA is an environment kernel supporting the elaboration, analysis, documentation, and maintenance of the various products developed during an entire software lifecycle. Its central component is an environment database n which properties about software objects and relations are collected. These properties include texts written in various formalisms. Two kinds of tools are provided: 1) high- level tools for updating, querying, reporting and maintaining multiple versions of software objects and relations consistently in the database, and 2) syntax-directed tools like structural editors for manipulating the formal texts attached to software objects and relations in the database. A basic feature of the ALMA kernel is its genericity. Tools of the first kind are parameterized on software lifecycle models while tools of the second kind are parameterized on formalisms. Instantiated versions of them for specific models arid formalisms are generated by a meta-environment, which also generates the environment database structure tailored to the desired lifecycle model. This paper concentrates on the database support meta-system and the instantiated database support 5) stems it generates. Our main concern is to discuss the architectural design decisions we made and the mechanisms we introduced for achieving parameterization on lifecycle models. In particular, we describe the entity-relationship meta-model we designed for meta-defining a particular lifecycle model as input to the meta-system. This meta-model is an extension of standard entity-relationship models in that n-ary relations can have attributes, they can be defined on unions of entity types, type specialization with multiple inheritance is supported, and a mechanism is provided for defining views yielding different environment subdatabases associated with different classes of users and/or tools. The crucial role played by this meta-model will be stressed all along the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]