Assessment of a Lightweight Formal Method for Specifying and Analyzing Requirements
Kendra Cooper, Erik Jonnson, Tim Menzies · 2001
Tools in requirements engineering are recognized as a key component in achieving the goal of building systems better, faster, and cheaper. Tools don't get distracted, don't need a lunch break, don't have another meeting to attend, don't make (as many) mistakes, and they don't get bored. Despite this, few of the research tools in RE are being adopted in the broader SE community. Why? Our thesis is that many of the research tools excel at tasks that are not interesting to commercial practitioners. For example, users are more likely to use a tool if it can be quickly applied to their current practice and many research tools are not widely applicable. The article describes a general approach for the construction and evaluation of domain-specific RE tools of high applicability. By using this methodology, it can be shown that developing a notation and its tool support is cost-effective. The evaluation is so precise that a "break-even " point can be defined after which this approach is clearly useful.