Traceability and interfacing between requirements engineering and UML domains using the standardized ReqIF format

Abstract

Model Driven Development (MDD) is deemed as a key to address the increasing complexity of software systems. It is imperative that the developed software fulfills the end-user's requirements. This implies that a collaboration between the Requirements Management (RM) tools and the modeling tools, enabling complete traceability and interfacing among these tools, is essential. On the other hand, existing tools collaborating between RM and modeling tools support a very limited sub-set of new features (e.g. traceability analysis) and are compatible with only a few tools. As a result, software engineers are often required to educate themselves on another (often complex), intermediate (collaborating) tool, merely to realize a very limited sub-set of supported features. This paper addresses these gaps and introduces an approach for exchanging information between RM tools and Unified Modeling Language (UML) tools by using the standardized Requirements Interchange Format (ReqIF). The proposed approach (a) enables software developers to create links between requirements and UML elements in their modeling tool and (b) facilitates requirements engineers to make traceability/other analyses down to linked model elements inside their RM tool. In contrast to many other approaches, no additional user interface is needed for traceability.