Tool-Supported Requirement Engineering: A Categorization of the State of the Art and Research Trends

Abstract

The multiple activities that are part of Requirements Engineering (RE) are benefited from the support of software tools that assists the application of diverse techniques. Given the importance of this phase in software development and specifically in product safety, this article aims to compile the current status of software tools used in the different RE activities to direct future development efforts in this type of tools and identify the activities of the RE, the implemented techniques and which tools focus on the requirements associated with safety. We used systematic literature review method for reviewing the literature on RE tools. We used automatic search strategies for searching the relevant papers published between 1 January 2013 and 31 December 2018 and Meta-aggregation to synthesize the data extracted from the primary studies and to obtain a categorization of findings. We selected 50 articles, 33 conference and 17 journal papers, from the initially retrieved 10,191 articles. The results from the data analysis 248 findings enabled us to classify RE tools in 15 categories and 29 subcategories. This review has enabled us to identify the following areas for further research in software tool assisted RE: 1) is necessary to perform more research on the development of RE tools that specialize in software requirements associated to a quality attribute of interest as safety; 2) it is important to development RE tools activities different areas from requirement specification, validation and management; 3) in is important to conduct evaluation the RE tools founds in non-academic environment.