Experience with designing a requirements and architecture management tool

Effective tool support is much needed for the tedious and error prone task of managing system requirements and system architectures. With the primary objective of providing practical support for software engineers, we have developed a tool for managing system requirements, system architectures and their traceability which is being used in real-world industrial projects. The tool is based on a well considered information model of system requirements and architecture, and embodies a set of document templates providing guidance for software engineers. The author reports on experience in designing and improving the tool. In particular, we highlight a number of case studies that played a significant role formulating the information model and document templates, and provide an assessment of the tool relative to existing practice.