Requirements, traceability and DSLs in eclipse with the Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF)

Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) is a crucial aspect in systems development and is the area of ongoing research and process improvement. However, unlike in modeling, there has been no established standard that activities could converge on. In recent years, the emerging Requirements Interchange Format (RIF/ReqIF) gained more and more visibility in the industry, and research projects started to investigate these standards. To avoid redundant efforts in implementing the standard, the VERDE and Deploy projects cooperate to provide a stable common basis for ReqIF implementation that could be leveraged by other research projects as well. In this paper, we present an Eclipse-based extensible implementation of a RIF/ReqIF-based requirements editing platform. In addition, we also investigate two related aspects of RE that take advantage of the common platform. Firstly, how can the quality of requirements be improved by replacing or complementing natural language requirements with formal approaches such as domain specific languages or models. Secondly, how can we establish a robust traceability mechanism that links different artifacts of a development process like requirements, design etc. © 2012 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.