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A Light Weight Tool for Teaching the Development and Evaluation of Requirements Documents Abstract

Writing correct and consistent software requirements specification (SRS) is one of the most important goals of a requirements engineering process. The SRS serves as the basis for subsequent design, testing and maintenance of the software product. The more errors and inconsistencies contained in an SRS, the more time and efforts are required to correct them at a later stage in the development process. Most SRS documents are manually typed using a word processor and hence the writer is responsible for ensuring the correctness and consistency of the document. Without adequate tool support, the manual construction and analysis of SRS documents is a tedious process and is error-prone. This paper describes an interactive tool developed at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse that assists students preparing an SRS document based on the IEEE standard 83019981. The tool provides an easy-to-use interface and the ability to create, edit, load and save SRS documents. In addition, it evaluates the requirements document based on criteria published by the Software Metrics program at the Software Assurance Technology Center, NASA2. A function-point metrics analyzer is also built into the tool so that the efforts required to complete the project specified in the document can be evaluated.

Introduction

A project-oriented course in Software Engineering generally requires the students to analyze the requirements for the problem and then write the software requirements specification (SRS) document. Since the SRS serves as the basis for design, testing and maintenance of the software product, the students are expected to follow some standard such as IEEE 830-19981 while developing the SRS. A sample functional requirement in IEEE standard format is shown in Figure 1.

Index: ATM.2 Name: Deposit Purpose: To deposit an amount into an account Priority: High Input parameters: account number, amount Output parameter: None Action: Ensure that account number exists. Ensure that amount is greater than zero. Retrieve the account with account number. Update the balance in the account by adding amount to it. Exceptions: account number does not exist. amount is less than or equal to zero. Remarks: None Figure 1: An IEEE 830 compliant functional requirement in an ATM system

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Garbers, B., & Periyasamy, K. (2006, June), A Light Weight Tool For Teaching The Development And Evaluation Of Requirements Documents Paper presented at 2006 Annual Conference & Exposition, Chicago, Illinois. 10.18260/1-2--138