A New Tool to Help Filling Requirements Documents 2008-36-0287

Nowadays, given the shrinking budgets and deadlines of the aerospace and automotive industries, the importance and need of the requirements engineering is becoming more and more evident. This means that progressively more users face a difficult task on the different environments of project development: 1) to write better requirements; and 2) to do it faster than ever. It would be nice if they had some tools to help them and abbreviate such a difficult task.

This work summarizes the development of a new tool that does exactly that. Its wizard guides the user through the steps necessary to create good requirements when writting a requirements document, depending on the kind of requirements document desired. For example: there are significant differences between user requirements and system requirements documents. The wizard script is composed by a serie of questions related to the parts of the scheme to build a complete and effective requirement. The first selection of the user in the wizard is the kind of requirements document that will be written. After that, the wizard asks questions according to the requirements document type selected; and, using the answers given, it builds the requirement.

While writting the requirements document, the user may have the option to write the requirement by himself or to activate the wizard, for each requirement needed. Preliminary tests show that using the wizard reduces significantly the cost and time to develop the requirements document.