Planguage - Requirements Engineering and Management for Software Development Projects - page 240

Appendix B
Planguage

B.1 Introduction

Planguage was developed over a period of time by Tom Gilb ( www.gilb.com )
during his work as a faculty member, as well as, a consultant to various profes-
sional organizations such as HP, IBM, Intel, Philips, Ericson and so on. It was
intended for use in systems engineering to improve the quality of specifications. It
was published in topic form in 2005 under the title of ''Competitive Engineering:
A Hand Book for Requirements Engineering, and Software Engineering using
Planguage'', authored by Tom Gilb and published by Elsevier Butterworth-
Heinemann, USA. This appendix is an excerpt from that topic with permission
from Tom Gilb. I record here my sincere thanks to Mr. Tom Gilb for giving me
permission to include details about Planguage in this topic. If any reader wishes to
have a comprehensive understanding of Planguage, I suggest reading the above
mentioned topic which is about 500 pages of tightly-packed information.
Planguage gives us tools to tackle large and complex systems with an objective
of reducing the risk of waste, delay and failure. Planguage should be viewed as a
powerful way to develop and implement strategies that will help the project to
deliver the required competitive results. Planguage focuses on reducing or

eliminating the ambiguity in the specifications.

B.2 Planguage

Planguage consists of a specification language and a corresponding set of process
descriptions. These two (Planguage terms and processes) are used together. The
Planguage terms consist of concepts, grammar, and icons. The process descriptions
consist of best practices for carrying out certain tasks. These are, Requirement
Specification, Design Engineering, Specification Quality Control, Impact Estimation,