From Requirements to Ready to Run Software: A Brief Thought on How to Mechanize The Software Development Process

This paper presents a vision on how the software development process could be a fully unified mechanized process by getting benefits from the advances of Natural Language Processing and Program Synthesis fields. The process begins from requirements written in natural language that is translated to sentences in logical form. A program synthesizer gets those sentences in logical form (the translator's outcome) and generates a source code. Finally, a compiler produces ready-to-run software. To find out how the building blocks of our proposed approach works, we conducted an exploratory research on the literature in the fields of Requirements Engineering, Natural Language Processing, and Program Synthesis. Currently, this approach is difficult to accomplish in a fully automatic way due to the ambiguities inherent in natural language, the reasoning context of the software, and the program synthesizer limitations in generating a source code from logic.