A requirements engineering testbed: concept and status

Abstract

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.

Proto Code Generation Techniques

“…Functional, user interface, and performance models can be constructed easily, and at varying levels of abstraction or granularity, depending on the specific behavioral aspects of the system being exercised. REE is being developed as part of Rome Laboratory's research program in requirements engineering which has been in place since 1985 [Rzepka 1992]. …”

“…Parallel Processing Software Requirements [Bums 1991] "• A Requirements Engineering Testbed: Concept and Status [Rzepka 1992] "* Specification Prototyping of Concurrent Ada Programs in Proto [Acosta 1992] "° Requirements Engineering Technologies at Rome Laboratory [Rzepka et al 19931 •…”