Comment by AnimalMuppet
2 years ago
Calculate ease-of-use of a GUI. Yes, you can, to some degree. You also can't, to some other degrees.
Calculate correctness of some business logic, when part of "correctness" is correspondence to some badly-written procedures, and another part is correspondence to some regulations that are spread across ten thousand pages.
Calculate correctness of an OS scheduling algorithm that has to work against a (not precisely known) variety of task mixes.
And so on. There are parts of the requirements that are blurry and hand-wavy. That makes the "calculation" approach hard. At least, you have to translate the hand-wavy stuff into precise things that you can calculate. And you can't calculate that translation process, because the inputs are hand-wavy.
Given a formal specification the idea is that a theory should be in place to calculate the design. We don't fully have this yet.
Given a hand wavy blurry specification, well... of course the implementation will be blurry and hand wavy as well.
Well... given a hand wavy blurry specification, you can create a formal specification - just not by formal means.
Changing the specification is fine.