A hypermedia workstation for requirements engineering
Peter H. Aiken, James Dean Palmer · Medical Entomology and Zoology · 1989
This research investigates the technical feasibility of providing hypermedia-based support, in the form of a workstation supporting the requirements engineering portion of the software development life cycle. Hypermedia-based tools and techniques appear capable of supporting a wide range of the needs of requirements engineers, needs that are currently not being met with contemporary tools and techniques. The hypermedia workstation supports requirements engineering with a set of tools and techniques capable of positively effecting the efforts of software engineers. Requirements engineering tasks support four functions. This document describes hypermedia support for each function, the goals of that support, and the basis for hypermedia-based implementation of that support. The hypermedia workstation is a first attempt to implement of support for the functions in an integrated environment. The workstation was constructed with off-the-shelf components and specially developed software. The software supports four basic requirements engineering functions, and provides contributions to software productivity. The workstation can be used to examine the potential benefits offered by hypermedia-based tool and techniques. The primary contribution of the dissertation is support for enhanced software productivity including: (a) It provides an environment that facilitates development of an unconstrained data model which can be used to represent requirements information; (b) It offers a means of reducing the effort associated with requirements engineering tasks, thereby permitting the engineer to concentrate on the results rather than on the mechanics of getting them; (c) It has features that support the use of reusable requirements information in the form of an institutional memory; (d) It increases the efficiency and effectiveness of prototyping efforts; (e) It facilitates learning about unfamiliar software applications; (f) It introduces video-based, and other non-traditional media, into the requirements process; and (g) It incorporates wide-spectrum requirements information and analysis methods as a means of gaining new knowledge about complex sets of requirements.