Modeling Requirements with RED
Harald Störrle · Technical University of Denmark, DTU Orbit (Technical University of Denmark, DTU) · 2014
Shortcomings in Requirements Engineering (RE) are known to be the prime source of software development project failures. Better education can help improve this situation, but a critical prerequisite is adequate (and affordable) tooling for modeling and working with requirements specifications. The author has been teaching a major Requirements Engineering class at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) for six years, and the need of tool support to do practical case-study work is quite obvious. We had prior experience with commercial tools (DOORS, RequisitePro, and JIRA), and we have tried different approaches to tooling in the course, including the “pragmatic” solution (spreadsheets and text documents), an open source RE tool (OSRMT, with massive customization), and a UML tool (MagicDraw, with extensions). Neither of them proved to be helpful. Among their disadvantages are their high cost (licenses, customization, learning), vendor lock-in, a hard-wired development approach, eclectic coverage of requirements concepts, and inconsistent terminology. In a nutshell, existing tools are focused on practical software production and specific customers while the concerns of education are less important. So, eventually, we decided to build our own tool, the Requirements Editor (RED). RED is specifically created to address the needs of students and teachers, but it has matured beyond a mere academic prototype: based on personal experience with RE tools in large development projects, we believe it outperforms many existing commercial products.