SysML-Based Requirement Management to Improve Software Development

Abstract

Among the various steps in the life cycle of software development, system requirement management is an essential but often neglected step. Comprehensive requirement management can not only help developers to work on a system to meet the requirements of a project, but can also play a vital role in the communications among stakeholders. In general, natural languages are often used to describe and record user requirements; however, this results in ambiguity, inconsistency, imprecision and incompleteness. To increase the accuracy of requirement modeling and analysis, it is important to have appropriate management methods and tools such that the requirement engineering process can be supported within the project. In this work, we propose a System Modeling Language (SysML)-based requirement management methodology to assist in the collection and the modeling of user requirements. We also provide a convenient procedure and a prototype tool to model, analyze, validate and verify the recorded system requirements, and consequently to ensure that the system can satisfy users’ requirements.