Requirements Management Tools: A Quantitative Assessment

This report is primarily aimed at people with some background in Requirements Engineering or practitioners wishing to assess tools available for managing requirements. We provide a starting point for this assessment, by presenting a brief survey of existing Requirements Management tools. As a part of the survey, we characterize a set of requirements management tools by outlining their features, capabilities and goals. The characterization offers a foundation to select and possibly customize a requirements engineering tool for a software project. This report consists of three parts. In Part I we define the terms requirements and requirements engineering and briefly point out the main components of the requirements engineering process. In Part II, we survey the characteristics and capabilities of 6 popular requirements management tools, available in the market. We enumerate the salient features of each of theses tools. In Part III, we briefly describe a Synergistic Environment for Requirement Generation. This environment captures additional tools augmenting the requirements generation process. A description of these tools is provided. In the concluding section, we present a discussion defining the ideal set of characteristics that should be embodied in a requirements management tool. This report is adapted from a compendium of assignments that were prepared by the students in a Requirements Engineering class offered in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech

Problem Identification and Decomposition within the Requirements Generation Process

Only recently has the real importance of the requirements generation process and its requisite activities been recognized. That importance is underscored by the evolving partitions and refinements of the once all-encompassing (and somewhat miss-named) Requirements Analysis phase of the software development lifecycle. Continuing along that evolutionary line, we propose an additional refinement to the requirements generation model that focuses on problem identification and its decomposition into an associated set of user needs that drive the requirements generation process. Problem identification stresses the importance of recognizing and identifying the difference between a perceived state of the system and the desired one. We mention pre- and post-conditions that help identify and bound the problem and then present some methods and techniques that assist in refining that boundary and also in recognizing essential characteristics of the problem. We continue by presenting a process by which the identified problem and its characteristics are decomposed and translated into a set of user needs that provide the basis for the solution description, i.e, the set of requirements. Finally, to place problem identification and decomposition in perspective, we present them within the framework of the Requirements Generation Model