Requirements Tool

Definition

Requirements Tool: a software tool that automates all or part of the performance of one or more tasks that are primarily related to the requirements

Classification

Requirements Tool in the OPF Method Component Inheritance Hierarchy

As illustrated in the preceding figure, Requirements Tool is part of the following inheritance hierarchy:

Type: Concrete
Superclass: Tool
Subclasses:
- Requirements Identification (Elicitation) Tool
- Requirements Analysis (Modeling) Tool
- Requirements Prototyping Tool
- Requirements Specification Tool
- Requirements Management / Reuse Tool
Example Instances:
Other listings of requirements tools include:
- INCOSE
- Systems Guild

Responsibilities

The typical responsibilities of a Requirements Tool are to:

Automate requirements engineering tasks that were previously performed manually.
Thereby increase the:
- Quality of requirements-related work products.
- Productivity of teams and roles when working on requirements-related work products.
Requirements Engineering Objectives, which are related to fulfilling requirements engineering tasks
Other Functional Objectives, which are related to fulfilling tasks of other activities that are nonetheless strongly related to requirements.
Quality Objectives, which are related to required quality factors of the tools.

Requirements Engineering Responsibilities

The typical responsibilities of requirements tools are to enable the requirements team (and other stakeholders) to better perform one or more of the following requirements engineering tasks:

Requirements Identification:
- Identify requirements via keywords (e.g., shall, must, will).
- Capture requirements (e.g., input raw requirements via forms and lists, shared workspaces and bulletin boards, instant messaging).
Requirements Reuse:
- Locate relevant reusable requirements.
- Import existing reusable requirements.
Requirements Analysis:
- Enable modeling (e.g., use case modeling, object modeling, data modeling, state modeling, function modeling).
- Draw and maintain diagrams.
Requirements Prototyping:
- Requirements-based simulation.
- Automatic design and code generation.
Requirements Specification:
- Automate requirements specification production.
- Partially automate the production of related work products (e.g., endeavor glossary and business object model).
- Publish and communicate requirements specifications and reports.
- Support formal (e.g., ANSI, DOD, FAA, IEEE, ISO, NASA) and informal (e.g., OPF) documentation content and format standards.
- Support requirements access and editing (e.g., directly, via filters, or via ad-hoc metadata-based queries).
- Notify stakeholders when relevant requirements change (e.g., via publish/subscribe).
Requirements Management:
- Support the requirements model (e.g., requirements type hierarchy, relationships between requirements).
- Store requirements (e.g., text, diagrams, graphs, tables, spreadsheets).
- Store requirements characteristics (attributes, metadata).
- Store relationships between requirements.
- Trace requirements (from sources, to architectures, designs, implementations, and tests).
- Prioritize requirements for scheduling.
- Identify requirements baselines.
- Assign requirements to baselines.

Other Functional Responsibilities

Typical additional functional responsibilities of requirements tools are to enable other teams to better perform one or more of the following tasks:

Configuration Management Tasks:
- Configuration Control:
  - Support impact analysis of requirements changes.
- Version Control:
  - Control version to the requirements.
Management Tasks:
- Personnel Management:
  - Allocate requirements to team and roles.
- Schedule Management:
  - Estimate endeavor percent complete.
  - Estimate endeavor total schedule.
- Scope Management:
  - Support scope impact analysis of requirements changes.
Metrics Engineering Tasks:
- Metrics Collection:
  - Collect metrics on requirements number and status).
- Metrics Analysis:
  - Analyze requirements metrics (e.g., bar charts of percent complete and number tested.
  - Estimate endeavor cost.
  - Estimate endeavor percent complete.
  - Estimate endeavor total schedule.
- Metrics Reporting:
  - Report requirements metrics.
Quality Engineering Tasks:
- Requirements Evaluation:
  - Provide and manage inspection checklists.
  - Verify requirements and specifications against standards and templates.
  - Check requirements for internal and external consistency.
  - Check for poor word choices (e.g., words that are ambiguous or vague).

Quality Responsibilities

Typical quality responsibilities of requirements tools include:

Interoperability.
Requirements tools often overlap with and should be interoperable and integrated with:
- UpperCASE modeling tools to support the storage of the results of requirements analysis (e.g., use case models and associated use case, sequence, and activity diagrams).
- Configuration management tools to avoid duplication of configuration and version control.
- Documentation tools to provide for the automatic generation of requirements specifications.
- Test tools to support the traceability of requirements to test cases.
Security.
The requirements of sensitive applications (e.g., military applications, business-critical applications) may themselves be highly confidential and require adequate security from international and industrial spies.
Timeliness.
Users of the requirements work products may need timely notifications when relevant requirements are changed.
Usability.
Requirements tools should be highly usable to:
- Their primary users, the members of the requirements team.
- The various users of the requirements work products, who may want to directly access the requirements repository (e.g., with ad-hoc queries).

Guidelines

Change notification is a critical feature of requirements tools due to the iterative, incremental, and parallel nature of requirements engineering.
The requirements tool should support collaborative development by multiple distributed users because of the team and distributed nature of requirements engineering.
Requirements specification tools should support all relevant:
- Media (e.g., paper, electronic, Web).
- Data formats (e.g., MS Word, Rich Text Format, Interleaf, Framemaker, HTML, XML).
- Formal (e.g., ANSI, DOD, FAA, IEEE, ISO, NASA) and informal (e.g., OPF) documentation content and format standards.
The requirements database should store individual requirements as individual objects to provide adequate granularity for updates and change notification. This typically implies that requirements are directly entered into the tool and that the requirements specifications are automatically generated from the tool’s database (requirements repository) via templates that conform to the associated specifications’ content and format standards.