Software Tool Support for Requirements Analysis
Software requirements tools support requirements activities: modeling, analyzing, prioritizing, classifying, managing (planning, scheduling, reviewing, and monitoring), measuring, allocating to design and implementation components, tracing, version and configuration identification and control, and validating. The modeling and diagramming tools, management, measurement, allocation, and configuration management tools are common in each SDLC phase. Formal tools provide support for analysis of correctness, completeness, and consistency; for generation of test cases, use cases, and other UML models; and for translating formal specifications diagrams to requirements specification documents.
Consider the requirements analysis phase activities:
- requirements elicitation,
- analysis,
- specification, and
- validation.
Tools that support the activities of these phases are manual practices such as interviews and reviews, UML concept models, and prototyping. These activities involve the interaction of software engineers with users and stakeholders and the transition of significant stakeholder decisions in an application problem domain to components in a technical solution domain. Thus, requirements tools are largely manual, project management and control-oriented, or test support tools. As the software evolves in development and models become more detailed, support becomes more automated, such as translating detailed design models to code. As the formality of Model diagrams increases, automatic generation of code from Use cases will become more feasible. Read this short overview of automated tools for Requirements Analysis.
Several current popular software tools for requirements activities are:
Valispace – cloud-based – requirements management platform – supports design, tracking, and management of requirements
IBM: DOORS – web-based tool – supports capturing, tracing, analyzing, and managing changes to requirements (Note: DOORS is an old tool released in the early 1990s, but has been updated over the years and is still a widely used tool)
Jama – web-based tool – supports capture, communication, tracing of requirements and relationships, and tracking changes and decisions.
Source: Saylor Academy
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