ESL tutorial

Welcome to the Elephant Specification Language tutorial! This tutorial will introduce you to the reasoning behind and concepts within the Elephant Specification Language, or ESL for short.

Info

For a more in-depth explanation of ESL's foundations you can always check the Reference pages.

Introduction

System Engineers play a vital role in the development of complex systems. Coordinating the design and production of thousands of components across modules, teams, departments and even companies is an immense challenge! Currently, the design documentation or "specs" of a system are often communicated in the form of PDF, Word, and Excel files. Several solutions exist that try to organize these files and tie them to the components they are supposed to describe.

Although this document organization is helpful, the documents themselves form a huge blind spot as they are often inconsistent, incomplete, and out-of-date. Enter ESL! A highly structured though human-readable specification language that introduces a fixed syntax while allowing the expression of any design requirement or constraint. Since its syntax is fixed, the ESL documents can be checked and analyzed automatically for their consistency and completeness.

Moreover, all relations, dependencies and links of requirements to components and variables are automatically derived from the specification instead of having to be maintained manually. Even for simple projects the number of dependencies quickly exceeds the 100 or even 1,000 mark! The automated dependency derivation reduces the risk of human error drastically, as dependencies cannot be forgotten to be added by definition.

Naturally, not every System Engineer you come across will work with ESL specifications, which is where the generated PDF output comes in. Nicely formatted documents, generated right from your ESL specification, which once more guarantees their consistency!

Furthermore, as ESL documents are written in plain text, they are exceptionally suitable for Version Control Systems such as Git.

Running example

The different concepts in the ESL language will be explained using an example specification. We are going to specify a water pump, that consists of a centrifugal pump driven by an electromotor, with several requirements to the subcomponents, dimensions, and performance.

Next!

Press next (or N on your keyboard) to head over to the next page!