We are interested in how a problem description can be acquired from a client, subse­quently debugged, and finally turned into a formal software specification. In this paper we discuss a) the components of a proposed system for handling these processes, b) the results of preliminary protocol studies in support of the acquisition component of our system, and c) our prescription for further work in the area. We include an Appendix that contains pieces of our protocols that illustrate two important acquisition techniques that emerged from our studies, example generation and summarization.