Tools for Requirements Elicitation, Analysis and Validation Taking into account that these activities may involve some artifacts such as
observation reports (
user observation),
questionnaires (
interviews, surveys and polls),
use cases,
user stories; activities such as requirement
workshops (
charrettes),
brainstorming,
mind mapping,
role-playing; and even,
prototyping; software products providing some or all of these capabilities can be used to help achieve these tasks. There is at least one author who advocates, explicitly, for
mind mapping tools such as
FreeMind; and, alternatively, for the use of
specification by example tools such as
Concordion. Additionally, the ideas and statements resulting from these activities may be gathered and organized with
wikis and other
collaboration tools such as
Trello. The features actually implemented and standards compliance vary from product to product.
Tools for Requirements Specification A
Software requirements specification (SRS) document might be created using general-purpose software like a word processor or one of several specialized tools. Some of these tools can import, edit, export and publish SRS documents. It may help to make SRS documents while following a standardised structure and methodology, such as ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148:2018. Likewise, software may or not use some standard to import or export requirements (such as
ReqIF) or not allow these exchanges at all.
Tools for Requirements Document Verification Tools of this kind verify if there are any errors in a requirements document according to some expected structure or standard.
Tools for Requirements Comparison Tools of this kind compare two requirement sets according to some expected document structure and standard.
Tools for Requirements Merge and Update Tools of this kind allow the merging and update of requirement documents.
Tools for Requirements Traceability Tools of this kind allow tracing requirements to other artifacts such as models and source code (forward traceability) or, to previous ones such as business rules and constraints (backwards traceability).
Tools for Model-Based Software or Systems Requirement Engineering Model-based systems engineering (MBSE) is the formalised application of modelling to support system requirements, design, analysis, verification and validation activities beginning in the conceptual design phase and continuing throughout development and later lifecycle phases. It is also possible to take a model-based approach for some stages of the requirements engineering and, a more traditional one, for others. Very many combinations might be possible. The level of formality and complexity depends on the underlying methodology involved (for instance,
i* is much more formal than
SysML and, even more formal than
UML)
Tools for general Requirements Engineering Tools in this category may provide some mix of the capabilities mentioned previously and others such as requirement configuration management and collaboration. The features actually implemented and standards compliance vary from product to product. There are even more capable or general tools that support other stages and activities. They are classified as
ALM tools. ==See also==