> One might also ask how one encodes motivational statements into a more formal spec. Well, you can always add preambles or annotations that are not machine-re

> One might also ask how one encodes motivational statements into a more formal spec. Well, you can always add preambles or annotations that are not machine-readable. If you really want to stay machine-readable, you could try to work with logical proposition languages, such as PROLOG. Also, I think goal trees (or goal DAGs) could be interesting. Something along the lines of "Our top-level is to help the user maintain invariant A. To archieve this, we implement features B, C, D. Feature B requires technical change E in service X while features C and D must be developed jointly and will require changes F and G in services X and Y..." Of course something like this always looks vastly simpler than it actually is. I think in many cases, you'll be hard-pressed to even formulate a top-level goal in ordinary language. (Apart from the real goal: Someone from the C-Suite wants this feature) The question also remains: What do you want to do with that machine-readable representation. The best representation will be strongly dependent on your use-cases - and formal languages without clear use-cases have a risk of devolving into cargo-cults and empty rituals. (See the whole navel-gazing around REST and HATEOAS)