STAR: a CASE tool for requirement engineering

Requirement analysis is one of the most critical and time-consuming steps in the software development process. Requirements are usually vague and imprecise in nature. They often conflict with each other and many conflicts are implicit and difficult to identify. Moreover accessing the customer's trade-off preferences among the conflicting requirements is challenging. A CASE tool that assists the software developer in identifying conflicting requirements and in analyzing trade-off relationship can be useful. In this paper we introduce a tool for the Specification, the Trade-off and the Analysis for the Requirements (STAR). We briefly describe the formal foundation for STAR, which uses fuzzy logic to specify imprecise requirements. STAR has a set of heuristics for inferring cooperative and conflicting relationships between requirements. Once the conflicting requirements are identified, STAR supports a systemic approach for assessing the relative priority between conflicting requirements.