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This paper describes a Requirements Engineering Testbed currently being developed and used by Rome Air Development Center. The goals of the testbed are to support the research and development of requirements engineering methods and tools, and in addition to serve as a host environment for applying these kinds of techniques to realistic requirements analysis, documentation and validation problems. The primary objectives for pursuing such applications are to evaluate the productivity of the processes involved and to assess the quality of the products produced. The testbed is based on a new process model for requirements engineering activities. Unlike earlier management oriented life cycle models, which described requirements engineering in terms of its products and milestones, this model provides a more detailed description of the fundamental activities occurring during requirements engineering and their relationships to design activities. It makes explicit concepts which earlier models ignored or held implicit, such as the iterative nature of requirements engineering activities. It also encompasses new techniques which have recently appeared in requirements analysis methods, such as dynamic analysis of requirements.The testbed's current implementation includes a requirements analysis method and two requirements validation techniques based on rapid protoytyping and simulation. Each of these tools is described from the perspective of a testbed user.The status of testbed R&D efforts, applications of this work and evaluation of the results are described. R&D efforts include the development of the two prototyping and simulation tools. Future work to integrate the three existing testbed tools into a single workstation environment is briefly discussed. Some of the early versions of these analysis and prototyping tools have been applied in three case studies. Results of this work have provided valuable feedback to tool developers for improving the user interfaces and functionality of the tools. These results also indicate that significant productivity gains can be realized from using testbed prototyping techniques to validate user interface requirements. Productivity data obtained from two of the applications is described.

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This paper describes the program of research and development of requirements engineering technologies ongoing at Rome Laboratory since the early 1980s. One research thrust i s based on a process model of requirements engineering and is implementing this model using conventional technologies. R&D activities have led to the enhancement of a requirements analysis tool and the development of two requirements validation tools based on rapid prototyping. Ongoing work is integrating these three tools into a requirements engineering workstation. Another research direction is taking advantage of artijicial intelligence work which is developing an alternative software development paradigm called the knowledge based sofhvare assistant. These efforts are described as well as their impact on future plans for evolutionary development of the workstation environment to incorporate these knowkdge-based approaches.

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