Download Basic Tool Support for Requirements Engineering

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2.4.1
Analysis
Market Development
Modern software development has an increased focus on the requirement phase
and a lot of research has commenced to generate quality requirements. There
are numerous different software requirement tools available and tools are now
developed to reach a broader audience than just a single company.
The increased focus is clearly a positive thing. The price for high end tools
are falling, new methods for gathering requirements are found and in the end
it all leads to better software development. The problem is that requirements
engineering is still a relatively new science and is handled in a lot of different
ways. It results in tools that are very different from each other and solves
different needs. This makes it hard to determine good from bad since it comes
down to the individual needs and expectations of the user.
2.4.2
Comparing Tools
Before creating a new tool, it is examined if the course needs can be met by an
available tools. This would make this thesis redundant and save a lot of time
and effort.
In Section 2.4.1 which analyses the markets development it is determined that
there are many different tools available. A complete master thesis could and
have been made about the different tools (see Abma (2009)). It is not the scope
of this thesis to do a complete market analysis. The focus is to compare some
of the high end tools, which in different comparative studies are given good
evaluations, the OSRMT mentioned in Section 2.3 currently used tools and the
tool to be developed in this thesis.
Two high end tools are selected. They are chosen based on their appearance in
numerous articles on their evaluation in these and because they are considered
relevant for course use. Price was not considered since the goal was to find ”the
best” possible tool for the course based on content. The following tools are
chosen:
DOORS
,,There are many commercial software packages that offer requirements management functionality; Telelogic DOORS is one of the market leaders.” (Cant
et al., 2006)