So I was looking at a list of requirements, trying to make sense of them and make sure I would come up with something that would satisfy them, when it occurred to me that you should bypass the middleman. Requirements should be written in the form of tests that pass iff the software satisfies them.
Turns out I'm a few years late. Dan North has already come up with the notion of "behavior-driven development". There are now parsers for "ubiquitous languages" in which one writes descriptions of how a piece of software should behave if you do certain things, and from those descriptions one generates tests. One example: Cucumber. (Why Cucumber? I think it's from the convention of having output from tests that fail come out in red while tests that pass generate output in green--like a cucumber.)
Haskell has some very neat facilities for testing, e.g. QuickCheck and HUnit. Is there a behavior-driven development package for Haskell? Why yes, there is: HSpec. Sweet.
