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.