Reengineering Requirements Specification Based on IEEE 830 Standard and Traceability

Abstract

In the recent years, we have seen the emergence and the growing of the software requirements engineering. Software requirements should be managed by using traceability. This will allow to better solve their conflicts and to eliminate faked or frivolous requirements that lack any justification. Meanwhile, writing the software requirements specification (SRS) must include traceability to allow a more efficient reading. Many standards have been proposed to provide efficient SRS templates such as the IEEE 830 standard. These standards present the content of the specification in a linear way, which often limits its use possibilities to a sequential reading. The proposed model of SRS uses a semi-structured data approach aiming at transforming the SRS into a hypermedia and is based on: (1) the IEEE 830 standard offering the SRS a tree’s structure; and (2) the requirements traceability links offering the SRS a network structure. Such links could connect each requirement backward from its source and forward to its corresponding design artefacts. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) building an XML schema for the proposed SRS model; and (2) building a prototype of a web-based system named SRSM (SRS Manager), based on the previous SRS model.