Tool Support for Requirements Management Quality from a User Perspective

Requirements in software development are fundamental in order to document and describe what the system to be developed basically “is” and how it should behave. The requirements are elicited, anlyzed and prioritized in the requirement process to produce a software requirement specification (SRS). The SRS can contain many requirements and large volumes of information, which calls for good requirements management (RM) and support tools (RM tools) to keep the SRS adequate and up to date. However, neither the requirement process nor RM tools have been investigated empirically but in a few cases. This study focuses on the use of the DOORS RM tool and investigates how it is perceived as a support to achieve the IEEE criteria for a good SRS. Based on qualitative interviews with six RM tool users, the conclusion is drawn that the tool in several aspects does support the users to reach good SRS quality, but that some criteria of high importance to the users, that the requirements can be ranked, traced and verified, lacks good support in the tool. Even though the tool from the IEEE criteria perspective is a good support, it is still not very much appreciated by the users. The users find the tool inflexible and of low interoperability. To explain this a slightly speculative conclusion drawn, is that the tool builds on a wrong assumption of the requirements process as rationalistic problem solving rather than problem construction.