Requirements management tool support for software engineering in collaboration:Master's thesis

Rigorous competition and tight time-to-market and quality requirements ofproducts are nowadays driving companies to develop products in collaboration.Collaborative development also comes with challenges; communication betweenparties and product and workflow management during the developmentbecomes more difficult. Especially, requirements management is seen as one ofthe most critical activities during the development process. In practice,requirements management means the identification of requirements andmanaging the requirements change. Change management includesrequirements traceability between other requirements and betweenrequirements and other artefacts, such as design and source code items and testcases. With the help of traceability, it is possible to see how certain requirementchange impacts on the product features and on whole development process.One possible solution to help the requirements management on collaborativedevelopment is the utilization of requirements management tools. In this thesis,it is studied what needs and requirements software industry has forrequirements management tools and what kind of software tools are availableon the market and how they can support requirements management incollaboration. This study started by analysing and evaluating requirementsmanagement tools and their strengths and weaknesses against the collaborationbased criteria. Based on this evaluation, one of the tools (IBM Rational RequisitePro) was chosen for a tryout in a case study, where it was analysed against the criteria with a fictional scenario. In collaborative softwaredevelopment, it is important that different tool vendor’s tools can work togetherand, for example, traceability links between different product artefacts can beshaped. For that reason, RequisitePro and Telelogic Synergy CM tools areintegrated between themselves using the Eclipse Framework as a base ofintegration. This integration demands the development of an extension plug-inbetween RequisitePro and Eclipse in order that these tools compose a workingsolution for RM tool support in collaboration. Based on the case study, we gained clear improvement proposals especially for a plug-in, so that it is easier to continue developing it. The case study also gave experiences and additional information about constructing a collaborative software development environment and thus, helping the development of the tool chain infrastructure. It can be said that processes, practices and agreements are drivers for inter-company collaboration and the role of the tools is to provide discipline for the practices and processes as well as contribute activities for more effective collaboration