ProR, an Open Source Platform for Requirements Engineering based on RIF

Abstract

Proper tool support in requirements engineering is important. A number of proprietary solutions are available in the market place, but few open solutions, and none that are widespread at this time. In this paper, we introduce ProR, an open platform for requirements engineering. The project was initiated by the EU FP7 Project ``Deploy'', which has the goal to make major advances in engineering methods for dependable systems through the deployment of formal engineering methods. Rather than building a project-specific solution, we decided to develop an extensible, general purpose platform. We based the tool's data model on the Requirements Interchange Format (RIF / ReqIF), a standard driven by the automotive industry. This gives us interoperability with a number of existing tools. The tool is based on the Eclipse Platform and uses the Eclipse Modeling Framework (EMF). We managed to establish a cooperation with the ITEA-Project ``Verde'', which supplied the implementation of the RIF data model. In this paper, we will introduce the tool, describe its architecture, and present a small case study. ProR is still under development, and we welcome contributors and are very interested in potential users to validate our approach. Please visit www.pror.org for more information, and to download the current development version.