Managing Changing Requirements with Tools Supporting the Unified Process

Abstract

Several modern software engineering processes advocate an iterative life-cycle approach. This involves that the set of requirements are refined throughout the system life-cycle. An ongoing refinement demands an active control of the requirements, which can be enabled with the support of a requirements management tool. This tool should provide capabilities to document, organize, track, and query requirements. It is important that the requirements management tool can be integrated with a process and tools used to support other activities of the development. It must be possible to transfer data between the different tools in order to ensure consistency. This thesis deals with the management of changing requirements according to the Unified Process, with the support of the requirements management tool RequisitePro. The requirements document of an existing system was used as a starting point. This document was imported to RequisitePro, and then altered to comply with the guidelines of the Unified Process. The results showed that the combination of the Unified Process with RequisitePro can be very useful, but that there are some problems. If requirements are organized as recommended in the Unified Process, RequisitePro makes it possible to actively control requirements by queries, traceability, and change history. The problems found concerned: lack of guidelines for documentation of use cases in RequisitePro, and difficulties with synchronization with the visual modeling tool Rational Rose. The conclusion drawn was that the solution to the problems of requirements management is found in the guidelines of a process and the experience of a skilled requirements engineer. The tool is the assistant that ensures that developers can perform their job more efficiently, and alleviates cumbersome tasks.