Reusing requirements through a modeling and composition support tool

Abstract

This paper presents the concepts and tools for reusing requirements being designed and implemented within the ITHACA project1. The RECAST (REquirements Collection And Specification Tool) tool guides the Application Developer in the requirement specification process by providing suggestions to the reuse of components. To this aim, RECAST includes a meta-level of definitions; here, meta-level classes associated to components contain design suggestions about the reuse of these components and about the design actions to be performed during the subsequent application development phases. A uniform approach is provided in RECAST for specifying both components and meta-level classes: the ORM specification model, especially oriented to requirement specification of object-oriented applications. The paper describes the components connection model, the environment for reusing requirements, and the interface of RECAST.