Monitoring Requirements Evolution using Views

This paper describes a research project concentrating on improving requirements management. We started this research by identifying the problems companies face with respect to requirements engineering in general, and requirements management in particular. We learned that monitoring requirements satisfaction is a major problem in practice. Requirements change continuously, making the trace-ability of requirements hard and the monitoring of requirements unreliable. As a solution, we developed a framework (requirements engineering system (RES)) that structures the process of requirements evolution, and a methodology that improves the traceability and monitoring of requirements. This methodology covers most of the processes defined in RES. We will implement the methodology in a tool, called ReqAnalyst. It uses latent semantic index (LSI), an information retrieval technique, to recover the traceability links between the requirements and other work products. This traceability information will be used to generate 'requirements views' that help monitoring the requirements. We will apply the methodology in several case studies