Requirements, Traceability and DSLs in Eclipse with the Requirements Interchange Format (RIF/ReqIF)

Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) is a crucial aspect in systems development and is the area of ongoing research and process improvement. However, unlike in modelling, there has been no established standard that activities could converge on. In recent years, the emerging Requirements Interchange Format (RIF/ReqIF) gained more and more visibility in industry, and research projects start to investigate these standards. To avoid redundant efforts in implementing the standard, the VERDE and Deploy projects cooperate to provide a stable common basis for RIF/ReqIF that could be leveraged by other research projects too. In this paper, we present an Eclipse-based extensible implementation of a RIF/ReqIF-based requirements editing platform. In addition, we are concerned with two related aspects of RE that take advantage of the common platform. First, how can the quality of requirements be improved by replacing or complementing natural language requirements with formal approaches such as domain specific languages or models. Second, how can we establish robust traceability that links requirements and model constructs and other artefacts of the development process. We present two approaches to traceability and two approaches to modelling. We believe that our research represents a significant contribution to the existing tooling landscape, as it is the first clean-room implementation of the RIF/ReqIF standard. We believe that it will help reduce gaps in often heterogeneous tool chains and inspire new conceptual work and new tools.